Raoul Eshelman - Performatism or The End of Postmodernism

Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
Raoul Eshelman
The Davies Group Publishers

Aurora, Colorado
Copyright © 2008 by Raoul Eshelman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, including but not exclusive
to, the text, the illustrations, and the design art may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the express written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging–in-publication data

Eshelman, Raoul, 1956-
Performatism, or, the end of postmodernism / Raoul Eshelman.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-888570-41-0 (alk. paper)
1. Arts, Modern--20th century. 2. Arts, Modern--21st century.
3. Semiotics and the arts. 4. Aesthetics. 5. Subjectivity. I. Title.
II. Title: Performatism. III. Title: End of postmodernism.
NX456.E69 2009
700’.41--dc22
2007048472
Cover photograph copyright © 2008, Raoul Eshelman.
Printed in the United States of America
1234567890
Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter One Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism 1
Performatist Framing 3; Performatist Subjectivity 8; Theist Plots 13;
Theist Narrative 19; Theist Creation in Architecture and the Visual
Arts 21; Performatist Sex 23; Performatist Time and History 29;
History 30; Cinematographic Time 33; Summary 36
Chapter Two Performatism in Literature 39
Checking out of the Epoch: Hotel World vs. “The Hotel Capital”
Hotel World 40; “The Hotel Capital” 44; Pi’s Believe It or Not 53;
Sad Sacks vs. Smiles: Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories 58; Beautiful Oth-
erness: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things 63; The End of
Posthistory: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader 67; Conclusion 76
Chapter Three Performatism in the Movies 79
Framing in Performatist Film 81; From Deism to Theism 89;
Performatist Cinematography 96; The Man Who Wasn’t There 99;
The Russian Ark 104; Memento 113
Chapter Four Performatism in Architecture 117
Transcendent Functionalism and the Spatial Representation of
Ostensivity 118; Performatist Architecture in Berlin 128
Chapter Five Performatism in Theory: The New Monism 161
Pragmatic Performatism: “Against Theory” 162; Paranoid
Performatism: Boris Groys’s Under Suspicion 164; Effervescent
Performatism: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology 168; Phenomenological
Performatism: Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given 175; Summary 193
Chapter Six Performatism in Art 195
Performatist Performance Art: Vanessa Beecroft 201; Performatist
Photography: Andreas Gursky’s Aesthetic Theism 206; Thomas
Demand: Bracketing the Real 213; Performatist Painting 215; Closed
and Open Horizons: Bulatov, Gursky, and Eitel 217; The Aesthetic
Workshop of Neo Rauch 222; Concluding Remarks 226
Index 265
Acknowledgments
Most of the material in Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism has

appeared previously.
Chapter One is based very loosely on my original article on performa-

tism, which was written in German and translated into English for
the journal Anthropoetics:
“Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism.” Anthropoetics VI, 2
Fall 2000/Winter 2001 (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/an-
thropoetics/home.html)
“Der Performatismus oder das Ende der Postmoderne. Ein Ver-
such.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 46 (2000), 149-173.
Chapter Two (Literature) combines two articles. The first originally

appeared in German in Poetica and was then translated and emendat-
ed for Anthropoetics; the second, “After Postmodernism,” was written
expressly for Anthropoetics:
“Aus der Epoche auschecken: Die Spätpostmoderne in Ali Smith’s
Hotel World und deren performatistische Überwindung in Olga
Tokarczuk’s Numery (Zimmernummern) und Miloš Urban’s Sed-
mikostelí (Die Rache des Baumeisters).” Poetica 1-2 (2004), 193-
219.
“Checking out of the Epoch: Performatism in Olga Tokarczuk’s
“The Hotel Capital” vs. Late Postmodernism in Ali Smith’s Hotel
World (with remarks on Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
and Miloš Urban’s Sevenchurch).” Anthropoetics 2 (2004 / 2005).
(http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/transhotel.htm)
“After Postmodernism: Performatism in Literature.” Anthropoetics
2 (2005/2006).
(http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1102/perform05.htm)
Chapter Three (Movies) combines two articles, one written for Anthro-
poetics and the other for the internet journal Artmargins:
Acknowledgments vii
“Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003).” In: Anthropoetics 2

(2002/2003). (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0802/movies.htm)
“Sokurov’s Russian Ark and the End of Postmodernism.” Artmar-
gins, 30 July 2003 (www.artmargins.com/content/cineview)
Chapter Four (Architecture) is a slightly shortened version of an ar-

ticle that appeared in Anthropoetics:
“Performatism in Architecture. On Framing and the Spatial Real-
ization of Ostensivity.” Anthropoetics 2 (2001/2002) (www.anthro-
poetics.ucla.edu/ap0702/arch2.htm)
Chapter Five (Theory) will appear with small changes in a Sonder-

band of the Wiener Slawistischer Almanach in 2008:
“Performatism in Theory: The New Monism.” Festschrift für Igor’
Smirnov, Wiener Slawistischen Almanach. Sonderband 69 �in prep-
aration].
Chapter Six (Art) is forthcoming in the 2007/8 edition of Anthropoetics.

viii Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
Introduction
Some twenty years ago, Andreas Huyssen published an article

called “Mapping the Postmodern”1 whose cartographic imagery
turned out to be ideally suited to describing the problem at hand.
At the time, postmodernism was a murky, uncharted terrain whose
existence was not acknowledged by many scholars and critics, let alone
the general public. Apart from Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne
(which had just come out in English) and Charles Jencks’s Language
of Postmodern Architecture, there were no book-length treatments of
the subject and only a few noteworthy articles and essays. Now, more
than two decades later, there is little question about the success of the
cartographic venture launched by Huyssen. Students can draw on a
well-regarded set of general works by authors like Hassan, Hutcheon,
Huyssen himself, Jameson, Jencks, and McHale as well as on a vast
body of more specialized studies. Today, few scholars and critics
would dismiss postmodernism offhand as a mere fad or style, and you
probably could, if so inclined, muster up a fair amount of agreement
on a canon of typically postmodern authors and works.
A funny thing happens, though, when you try to use the map
today. The reader perusing a novel like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the
cineast taking in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, or the pedestrian strolling
past the Presidential Chancellery in Berlin2 would have trouble con-
necting the standard descriptions of postmodernism with the works
of art in question. Life of Pi, for example, makes you want to identify
with a character who wants to believe in all major religions at once
– a monist, faith-based wish not exactly in keeping with the pluralism
and skepticism you would expect from a postmodern hero. Ghost Dog,
for its part, is about a lone hero single-mindedly sacrificing himself
in the name of an utterly rigid, hierarchical code of honor – also not
exactly a plot device easily accounted for by postmodernist notions of
decentered subjectivity and ludic regress. And, the Chancellery looks
like a sleek anthracite hatbox with windows chiseled into it; it certainly
doesn’t resemble the playful, eclectically decorated buildings described
x Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
by Charles Jencks in his classic work on postmodern architecture.

Of course, you might want to argue that all these works are all in
some way ironic – that they are ultimately just citing things alien to
postmodernism and then twisting them around in order to renew
and extend postmodernism itself. Even if you really believe this argu-
ment yourself, though, it’s hard not to feel how strained it is. For with
this simple formula you can assimilate literally anything back into the
endless field of the postmodern episteme. The fact remains that, as of
today, pulling out your trusty map of postmodernism doesn’t always
help when explaining contemporary books, films, and architectural
objects. There are simply too many narrative strategies and motifs
that go unexplained, too many artistic devices that diverge from the
expected postmodern patterns.
Given these striking deviations from prevailing postmodern norms,
you would think that there would be a groundswell of interest in
finding out whether they have something in common or if they might
all be leading in a similar direction. The case is quite the opposite,
however. In spite of a widely held feeling that both postmodernism
and its theoretical adjunct, poststructuralism, are on their way out,
there is little or no interest in inquiring about what a succeeding
epoch might look like or what other theoretical tools could be used
to describe it.3 This is due not just to plain force of habit, but also
to a fundamental assumption about how signs relate to things. In
poststructuralism explicitly and postmodernism implicitly, signs are
thought to be tacked onto things belatedly, whether through custom,
agreement, or happenstance. To achieve an understanding of things
you can only go through signs; hence the sign (or, more precisely, the
free-floating signifier) is the starting point for acquiring knowledge,
not the thing itself. This basic notion, enormously amplified and elabo-
rated in poststructuralist theory, is very difficult to get rid of once you
have it. For the alternative to “going through the signifier” from this
point of view is to assume either a mystical union of signs and things
– which no one in our secular world does anymore – or to be subject
to a partial, usually unconscious failure to recognize that “there is
nothing outside the text,” as Derrida puts it. And indeed, the force
of this particular argument is hard to refute both in theoretical and
Introduction xi
practical terms. No one wants to get caught practicing “metaphysics”

– tacitly basing your entire argument on something that is hidden
behind or beyond our semiotic frame of reference and that only you
are privy to. The result has been a partly hypercritical, partly defensive
discourse that tries above all else to minimize its own participation in
“metaphysics” while maximizing everyone else’s. Need less to say, this
sort of discourse must write off all unified concepts of the sign as old-
fashioned, metaphysical bunk.
The broad, practically universal consensus on the untenability
of monism has caused us to forget the historic instability of domi-
nant, seemingly unshakeable concepts of sign. A glance at the history
of culture shows that there have always been marked alternations
between split concepts of sign and monist ones.4 The prime reason for
this seems to be that both sign types have inversely related strengths
and weak nesses. Dualist concepts are strong on interpreting signs and
weak on describing how things affect us through signs; monist sign
concepts do precisely the opposite. At some point the one type begins
to exhaust its descriptive and creative possibilities and the opposite one
kicks in. Even if you’re not a firm believer in neatly marked literary
epochs, switches from Romanticism to Realism or from Symbolism
to the era of the modernist avant-garde suggest that basic concepts of
sign do change, and that it makes a very big difference when they do.
Given this historical experience it seems a bit premature to assume
that the concept of belatedness is the Last Word in this back-and-forth
contest. For to do so you have to assume that the postmodern notion
of the sign will be fine-tuned on into posthistorical infinity, but will
never, ever again be superseded by a sign that is monist and unified.
As I see it, we are now leaving the postmodern era with its
essentially dualist notions of textuality, virtuality, belatedness, endless
irony, and metaphysical skepticism and entering an era in which
specifically monist virtues are again coming to the fore. For the most
part, this process has been taking place directly in living culture,
around and outside the purview of academic theory. Although the
earliest theoretical expressions of the radical new monism – Eric
Gans’s Origin of Language and Walter Benn Michaels and Steven
Knapp’s essay “Against Theory” – came out in the early 1980s, they
xii Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
never made much headway against the prevailing dualist mindset. As

far as I’ve been able to tell, identifiably monist works of literature,
film, art, and architecture began to appear with some regularity in the
late 1990s; this trend has intensified noticeably since the turn of the
century. The development has been most conspicuous in architecture
– almost nothing built today resembles Jencks’s or Ventura’s exemplary
structures – as well as in art movies, which are more inclined to
innovation than mainstream cinema. In the art world, performatism
is ascendant but not yet dominant; in recent years major individual
artists have begun to stress unity, beauty, and closure rather than
the endless ironies of concept art and anti-art. In literature, the new
aesthetic is spreading slowly, as many authors still seem to have post-
structuralist narrative theory in the back of their heads while writing.
The one area, of course, where a consciousness of the new monism
is lack ing entirely is in the field of literary theory itself. Aware that
the times are a changin’, but unable to part with the split concepts of
sign developed by master thinkers like Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and
Deleuze, academic critics have widened their perspective to include
cultural studies, historicism, gender studies, and postcolonialism. De-
pending on your standpoint, this has resulted either in an enrichment
of the original theories or their degeneration into what one partisan
of deconstruction calls “the theory mess.”5 However you look at it,
though, the concept of sign remains the same. It is split, belated, and
devoted to pursuing an endless, irrefutable otherness that is largely of
its own making.
The aim of this book is to close the widening gap between theory
and the intensifying aesthetic trend towards monism – towards
strategies emphasizing unity, identification, closure, hierarchy, and
theist or authorial modes of narration. The name I’ve chosen for the
new aesthetic is, for better or worse, “performatism.” The term refers
to a strong performance, which is to say a successful, convincing, or
moving attempt by an opaque subject to transcend what I call a double
frame.6 Performatism as I understand it can be defined in terms of
four basic categories: ostensivity (a specific type of monist semiotics);
double framing (a specific way of creating aesthetic closure); opaque
or dense subjectivity; and a theist or authorial mode of organizing
Introduction xiii
temporal and spatial relations. These concepts will be developed

systematically in Chapter One as well as by way of example throughout
the rest of the book.
In terms of semiotic theory, I don’t pretend to originality. The
concept of what I call performatism draws heavily on Eric Gans’s notion
of the ostensive, which he developed in the early 1980s.7 While Gans
and I are in basic agreement about the need to boost monism, there
are differences about how we go about it. Gans, for example, treats
the ostensive – his elegantly parsimonious concept of the monist sign
– as a universal; I treat it as a specific expression of the new zeitgeist,
as the semiotic key to explaining the coming epoch. Whereas I limit
myself mainly to things aesthetic, Gans has his own, more expansive
notion of post-postmodernism, which he calls “post-millennialism”
and links closely to a neoconservative worldview that I don’t happen to
agree with. However, the basic question he poses – how to cope with
a world economically unified under global capitalism – is a valid one
for left-wing politics too. Works like Arundhati Roy’s God of Small
Things – treated in detail in Chapter Two – suggest a radical path
of resistance to capitalism based on a monistically conceived concept
of beauty rather than one of the victimary, eccentric otherness still
common in most postcolonialist theory.
The book is divided into six parts. After establishing the basic
idea of performatism using the well-known movie American Beauty
as a running example, I’ll turn to literature, film, architecture, theory,
and art, in that order. In regard to literature I’ve whittled my analyses
down to six case studies taken from contemporary German, Indian,
Polish, Czech, and Canadian literature: Bernhard Schlink’s The
Reader, Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories, Arundhati Roy’s The God of
Small Things, Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Hotel Capital,” Miloš Urban’s
Sevenchurch, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The film section is more
inclusive, ranging everywhere from the Danish Dogma 95 films to
mainstream movies like About Schmidt and Panic Room. Special
attention is paid to The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Russian Ark,
and Memento. The chapter on architecture focuses on new buildings
in Berlin designed by such leading contemporary architects as Sir
Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, and Axel Schultes. The
xiv Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
section on the “new monism” treats theoreticians such as Walter

Benn Michaels and Jean-Luc Marion who are already well known
in America. However, I’ll also discuss the work of two provocative
monist thinkers who write mainly in German, Boris Groys and Peter
Sloterdijk, and show how the new monism can work together with
performatism to describe the epochal changes now taking place
in world culture. The section on art treats three types of media
(performance art, photography, and painting) in the work of the
well-known contemporary artists Vanessa Beecroft, Andreas Gursky,
Thomas Demand, Tim Eitel, and Neo Rauch.
In developing my notion of a new monism I’ve avoided long
polemics with poststructuralism. In fact, it’s often helpful to run the
works discussed through a quick poststructuralist analysis to show the
aesthetic advantages of a performatist reading. Having made the crude
– but absolutely necessary – move of opposing monist to dualist signs,
I am well aware that the aesthetic shift now taking place doesn’t break
down into neat black-and-white oppositions. All performatist works
feed in some way on postmodernism; some break with it markedly,
while others retain typical devices but use them with an entirely
different aim. Still other works develop seemingly ironclad monist
positions only to fall back into postmodern irony. Nonetheless, cases
of true fence-straddling are rare: the logic of either one or the other
sign type tends to prevail in the end.
A special note is also in order regarding my scholarly background.
As a Slavist by training, I’m tempted to draw on works in not easily ac-
cessible languages like Russian, Czech, or Polish. Living and working
in Germany results in a bias toward that language, too. For the pur-
poses of this book, though, I’ve tried to favor literary works that are
available in English or – in the case of movies – are on the market as
subtitled videos or DVDs. Nonetheless, non-Slavist readers will have
to bear with more talk of Slavic films and literature than they are used
to in comparative discussions, and Slavists will have to do without
in-depth treatments of individual authors within their national
traditions. All in all, the book is intended less as a comprehensive
map of post-postmodernism than as a kind of do-it-yourself manual
for budding postmetaphysical monists. Given the guidelines provided
Introduction xv
in the following pages anyone with an open mind should be able to

construct a performatist map of their own.
This book would not have been possible without Eric Gans and his
theory of the ostensive; Eric was also kind enough to publish portions
of this work in his internet journal Anthropoetics. I have tried to repay
that debt performatively, as it were, by demonstrating throughout
the book the crucial importance of Eric’s generative anthropology for
defining the new epoch. Special thanks also go to Erika Greber for
giving me the chance to work out the fine points of performatism
while teaching Comparative Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian
University in Munich. My colleagues in the Slavic Department in
Munich, Aage Hansen-Löve, Ulrich Schweier, Miloš Sedmidubský,
and Renate Döring, were kind enough to offer me a job that enabled
me to continue writing. Students in Berlin, Munich, and Regens-
burg aided me with their comments, movie and book tips, e-mails,
and performatist term papers. Finally, for their friendship and moral
support while I was working on this project I would like to thank
Franziska Havemann, Marco Klüh, and Galina Vondraček.
Raoul Eshelman
Hausmehring (Upper Bavaria)
November 2007
xvi Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
Chapter 1

(American Beauty)
Performatism may be defined most simply as an epoch in which a

unified concept of sign and strategies of closure have begun to com-
pete directly with – and displace – the split concept of sign and the
strategies of boundary transgression typical of postmodernism. In
postmodernism – as hardly needs to be explained in great detail any
more – the formal closure of the art work is continually being under-
mined by narrative or visual devices that create an immanent, inescap-
able state of undecidability regarding the truth status of some part of
that work. Hence a postmodern building might create its own peculiar
architectonic effect by placing an art nouveau swirl next to a modern-
ist right angle, ironically suggesting that it is obligated to both styles
and to neither. And, a postmodern novel or movie might present two
equally plausible, parallel plot lines that remain undecidable within the
confines of the work. Turning to a higher authorial position to solve
this quandary is of little help. For the authorial intent behind the work
is what is responsible for this inner undecidability in the first place: it
simply sends us back to our point of departure. To escape this conun-
drum, we are forced to turn outside it – to an open, uncontrollable
context. Author, work, and reader all tumble into an endless regress of
referral that has no particular fix point, goal, or center.
This strategy has a direct theoretical counterpart in Derrida’s de-
construction of Kant’s ergon, the presumed center or essence of the
work.1 Derrida shows that any talk of intrinsic aesthetic value depends
on that value being set off from the “extraneous” context around it
by means of a frame. The frame, which at first seems an ornamental
afterthought to the painting, reveals itself as its crucial, undecidable
precondition; it is that place which is both inside and out, where text
and context meet in a way that is both absolutely crucial to the work’s
2 Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
makeup and impossible to determine in advance. Any claim that a

painting, text, or building is unified and closed can easily be shown
to fall into this same trap. Through the frame, the presumed closure
of the work is always already dependent on the context around it,
which is itself everything other than a coherent whole. Thus even
if the work’s creator did somehow manage to create a unified effect,
it would, through the frame, already be dependent on some aspect
of the context around it. Any way you look at it, the prospects for
creating a new, autonomous monist aesthetic are nil – at least from
the standpoint of the dominant postmodern and poststructuralist
mindset.
Performatist Framing
Given this basic – and epistemologically well-founded – suspi-

cion of concepts like intrinsic inner space, closure, and unity, how
do performatist works go about establishing a new oneness without
falling into old metaphysical traps? The answer lies in a new, radical
empowerment of the frame using a blend of aesthetic and archaic,
forcible devices. Performatist works are set up in such a way that the
reader or viewer at first has no choice but to opt for a single, compul-
sory solution to the problems raised within the work at hand. The au-
thor, in other words, imposes a certain solution on us using dogmatic,
ritual, or some other coercive means. This has two immediate effects.
The coercive frame cuts us off, at least temporarily, from the context
around it and forces us back into the work. Once we are inside, we are
made to identify with some person, act or situation in a way that is
plausible only within the confines of the work as a whole. In this way
performatism gets to have its postmetaphysical cake and eat it too.
On the one hand, you’re practically forced to identify with something
implausible or unbelievable within the frame – to believe in spite of
yourself – but on the other, you still feel the coercive force causing
this identification to take place, and intellectually you remain aware
of the particularity of the argument at hand. Metaphysical skepticism
and irony aren’t eliminated, but are held in check by the frame. At the
same time, the reader must always negotiate some kind of trade-off
Performatism – American Beauty 3
between the positive aesthetic identification and the dogmatic, coer-

cive means used to achieve it.2
The forced, artificial unification of a work takes place using what
I call double framing. This in turn breaks down into two interlocking
devices that I call the outer frame (or work frame) and the inner frame
(or originary scene). The outer frame imposes some sort of unequivocal
resolution to the problems raised in the work on the reader or viewer.
A good example of this is the conclusion of American Beauty, which
is probably the first popular mainstream movie in a rigorously monist
mode. At the end of the movie, the hero, Lester Burnham, is mur-
dered and in effect becomes one with nature. Floating over his old
neighborhood as an invisible voice, he extols the beauty of his past
life and suggests that we, too, will someday come to the same conclu-
sion after we’ve also died. You don’t have to have studied rocket sci-
ence – or deconstruction – to figure out what’s fishy about this kind
of argument. The film’s director has arbitrarily endowed an ordinary
character with supernatural powers and asked us to accept his literal
and figurative point of view as the film’s authoritative happy ending.
As secular viewers we will be disinclined to believe that Lester can re-
ally speak to us when he’s dead; as critical thinkers we will be skeptical
of his claim that the petty world of middle-class America portrayed
in the film is really beautiful. However, if you are at all serious about
analyzing the movie as it stands, you have little choice but to accept
this authorially certified argument as an indispensable part of the film
as a whole.
The dogmatic implausibility of the film’s outer frame or denoue-
ment does two things. It cuts us off – at least temporarily – from the
endlessly open, uncontrollable context around it, and it forces us back
into the work in order to confirm or deny Lester’s odd, authoritative
assertion about the beauty of life. In such a case we will encounter two
basic possibilities. Either some sort of irony will undercut the outer
frame from within and break up the artificially framed unity, or we
will find a crucial scene (or inner frame) confirming the outer frame’s
coercive logic. Whether or not a “lock” or “fit” develops between
outer and inner frame will determine whether we experience a work
as a total object of closed identification or as an exercise in endless,
ironic regress. Obviously, this opposition between the locked frame

and ironic decentering is not a cut-and-dried affair. There is always a
certain amount of tension between the fit between the frames and our
legitimate metaphysical and ideological skepticism. However, we are
now being offered a specific choice as to the outcome of a reading or
viewing rather than being condemned from the start to a misreading
or misprision.
Whereas the outer frame has an arbitrary or dogmatic quality
and seems to be imposed from above, the inner frame is grounded in
an originary scene: it reduces human behavior to what seems to be a
very basic or elementary circle of unity with nature and/or with other
people. Although this reduction can take place under very different
external conditions, I have found that it almost invariably involves
some element of what Eric Gans calls ostensivity. Since Gans’s notion
is the most elegant semiotic expression of the new monism, it’s worth
looking at it in more detail.3
Gans posits the existence of an originary scene in which two proto-
humans, who up to now have no language, become involved in a po-
tentially violent, uncontrollable conflict over some object – something
that René Girard calls mimetic rivalry.4 Under normal circumstances
a violent struggle would result, with one protohuman asserting him-
self over the other by means of physical force. In this particular case,
however, one of the potential combatants emits a sound intended to
represent the desired object. If the second protohuman in turn accepts
this sound as a representation or substitute for the desired object, the
sound becomes a sign and the conflict may be temporarily deferred.
The two antagonists have transcended their animal status by agreeing
on a sign representing and temporarily replacing a bone of contention;
through their act of spontaneous agreement they also lay the foun-
dations for all future acts of semiosis, and hence for all culture and
ritual. At the same time, because of its violence-deferring power, the
ostensive sign acquires a supernatural valence. Its co-creators, who are
unable to reflect on their own role in its creation, ascribe it a tran-
scendent origin, or what Gans calls the name-of-God. The point is
not whether the sign is really of divine origin; it’s that the sign could
be; it marks not only the boundary line between the human and the
animal but also between the immanent, real world and an outside,
possibly transcendent one. Although empirically unprovable one way
or another, the transcendent explanation of the sign remains an origi-
nary fact that we, too, as secular individuals have no choice but to
take seriously.5 Finally, in his hypothetical scenario Gans suggests that
the originary sign is also perceived as beautiful because it allows us to
oscillate between contemplating the sign standing for the thing and
the thing as it is represented by the sign. We imagine through the sign
that we might possess the thing but at the same time recognize the
thing’s inaccessibility to us, its mediated or semiotic quality.6
The diagram below shows how the originary scene arises as a dou-
ble frame – the inner frame of the sign makes possible the outer frame
of the human, which in turn makes it possible to generate still more
signs or inner frames.
The inner frame,

consisting of an
intuitively perceived
unity of sign and
sign thing.
1. Protohuman 1 2. Protohuman 2
emits a sign that accepts the sign,
refers to a desired thus deferring the
thing and at the thing conflict.
same time repre-
sents it.
Protohuman 1 Protohuman 2
The outer frame, consisting of the newly

created human collective and bounded
by an unknowable transcendent outside.
It is revealing to compare the originary monist sign with the no-

tion of double origin common to poststructuralism. A salient feature
of the originary, ostensive sign is that it is has no meaning. Rather
than automatically presupposing a relation with a binary opposite, as
deconstructive theory requires,7 it is a name referring first and fore-
most back to its own successful performance – the deferral of the
imminent, potentially deadly conflict and the founding of language,
cult, culture, and beauty. The ostensive sign is a performative tautolo-
gy, a simultaneous, spontaneously generated linguistic projection that
works in spite of the obvious conflicts and contradictions contained
within it. Thus you could argue with a certain justification that the
struggle for the desired object is only deferred, and that the multiple
projection marked by the originary sign is ultimately one of mutual
self-deceit. And, you could also object that the real work of culture
begins only after more complex, semantic signs have been added on
to the simple, originary one. All these assertions would be true. How-
ever, you would still have to concede that a synthetic, unified, object-
focused projection – and not an epistemological aporia – stands at the
beginning of all culture and continues to condition each individual
act of language.
Although it’s possible to muster both paleo-anthropological as well
as ethnological evidence for Gans’s hypothesis,8 neither is crucial to
my own argumentation. From my specifically aesthetic and histori-
cal point of view, the ostensive is quite simply the most elegant and
parsimonious monist answer that we have to the notion of dual origin
marked by différance and its many terminological cousins. The os-
tensive sign and the originary scene provide the minimal tool that can
help us describe other monist strategies as they cut through the end-
less regress and irony of postmodern culture and play out new, con-
structed narratives of origin in contemporary narrative and thematic
guises. The ostensive promises to be to the new epoch what dif férance
was to the old one: a minimal formulation of the dominant concept
of sign that manifests itself in everything from lowly pop culture to
high-flown literary theory.
In the case of American Beauty, this originary scene centers around
the white plastic bag which is filmed by Ricky Fitts and which later
floats through the air during Lester’s farewell address. As Ricky’s ut-
terances make clear, he sees in the bag nothing less than an embodi-
ment of the divine:
It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing.
And there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it,
right? And this bag was just... dancing with me. Like a little kid
begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That’s the day
I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this
incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was
no reason to be afraid. Ever.9
It’s also important to remember that Ricky shares Lester’s com-

plete tranquility of mind as well as his specific way of partaking of
the world’s beauty in all its plenitude (Ricky: “Sometimes there’s so
much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it... and my heart is
going to cave in”; Lester: “�...] it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so
much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at
once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about
to burst...”10). Obviously, the scene with the white plastic bag doesn’t
display literally all the features of the ostensive as described by Gans.
Ricky and Jane are lovers and not antagonists, and the plastic bag is
only the filmed reproduction of the original which Ricky plays again
because he “needs to remember.”11 However, the scene still embodies
a basic unifying, thing-oriented projection shared by Ricky, Jane and,
ultimately, Lester (in fact, you could maintain that Lester actually is
the plastic bag, since he becomes one with that animate, divine prin-
ciple of which Ricky has spoken earlier).
Now, you could argue that the plastic bag is nothing more than a
cheap token of the consumer culture that is satirized elsewhere in the
film and that Ricky is simply projecting his own wishful thinking
onto it. In terms of a purely epistemological critique you would even
be right. The problem remains, however, that within the total frame
of the work this wishful thinking is confirmed on a higher, autho-
rial level in Lester’s farewell speech as well as in terms of plot, when
he passes into an animate, beautiful, and comforting nature. If you
insist on rejecting the basic premise contained in both the inner and
outer frame, you’ll find yourself in an unpleasant bind. You’ll have
“exposed” the work on a dispassionate epistemological level but you’ll
have missed out on the aesthetic mixture of pleasure and anguish de-
rived from identifying with central characters and scenes.
Even the tragic denouement – Lester’s murder by Colonel Fitts
– doesn’t suffice to break up the movie’s immanent argumentation.
In effect, Colonel Fitts murders Lester because he follows his liberat-
ing example – and is then disappointed to discover that Lester isn’t a
closet homosexual like himself. The problem is not that Colonels Fitts
is evil; it’s that he doesn’t find the right “fit” within the frame of the
movie’s world (his violent “fit” is the flip side of this disappointment).
American Beauty, like all performatist works I’ll be discussing in the
following pages, is set towards metaphysical optimism. Even though
crucial events in it may be violent or have an annihilating effect on
individual characters, both perpetrators and victims have the chance
of fitting into a greater, redemptive whole, even if the time and point
of entry may be deferred for certain characters.
Performatist Subjectivity
Because of its focus on unity, performatism also allows for a new,

positively conceived – but not unproblematic – type of subjectivity. As
a reaction to the plight of the postmodern subject, who is constantly
being pulled apart and misled by signs in the surrounding context,
the performatist subject is constructed in such a way that it is dense or
opaque relative to its milieu. This opacity is, admittedly, ambivalent,
since it achieves a closed unity at the expense of participation in a vi-
able social environment of some kind. Moreover, the closed, opaque
subject runs the risk of incurring the enmity of its surroundings by
virtue of its very singularity and inscrutability. In some cases, this can
be resolved – as in the originary scene – by spontaneously arriving
at a common projection together with a potential opponent. This
may be expressed as a reconciliatory, amatory, or erotic scene, depending
on the circumstances. However, if the milieu turns violently against
the singular subject, we will have a sacrificial scene that results not
only in the subject’s elimination from the frame but also in its deifica-
tion, in its being made a focal point of identification and imitation for
other characters or the reader/viewer after it has been expelled from
the scene.12 Essentially, this is what happens to Lester. His “sense-
less” hedonist behavior is successfully imitated by Colonel Fitts – who
then makes Lester the scapegoat for their lack of sexual compatibility.
Shortly before his death, Lester himself transcends his original hedo-
nism by not seducing Angela; in death he becomes a narrating deity
at one with the outer frame of the movie as a whole.
I can’t emphasize enough that in performatism the subject’s new-
ly won opacity or denseness is constructed and doesn’t represent a
natural, pre-existing essence. Sometimes this constructedness is in-
tentional – as in the case of Lester, who deliberately sets out to act
like a teenager. However, it can also be completely involuntary, as in
the Russian movie The Cuckoo (Kukushka),13 where circumstances
throw together three people who speak three different languages. As
a result, they are unable to communicate with one another except
through ostensive signs, which is to say by pointing at present objects
and trying to arrive at a common projection or meaning beneath the
threshold of conventional, semantically organized language. In these
and other cases the constructed singularity is fairly trivial or even ac-
cidental – acting like a teenager or not happening to speak someone
else’s language are not positive traits in themselves. Performatism,
while reinstituting the subject as a construct, doesn’t ascribe it any
particular idealized or essential features before the fact. If the con-
ditions are however right – and the metaphysical optimism of the
new aesthetic tacitly ensures that they are – such subjects can become
figures of identification. This identification can appear in a multitude
of guises, but the structure of the ostensive scene suggests two basic
possibilities: the subject can be involved in a sacrificial act that tran-
scends the narrow frame of the self and invites emulation by others,
or the subject can transcend itself and enter into a reconciliatory,
amatory, or erotic relationship with another subject who reciprocates
that move in some way. This singular, identificatory performance, in
turn, invites others to emulate it at a later point in time and under
different circumstances.
It is also worth noting that the notion of constructed subjectivity

is not just reserved for fictional schemes. It has a very real counterpart
in Erving Goffman’s “frame analysis” which studies ritualized micro-
situations in everyday life.14 Like Derrida, Goffman proceeds from
an ironic and sometimes rather cynical metaposition from which he
demonstrates the unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable shifts
of reference between different codes or frames (what he calls “key-
ing”15). However, unlike Derrida, Goffman also makes very clear that
everyday human interaction is rooted in what one observer called a
“common focus on a physical scene of action”16 prior to language. For
Goffman, language is always anchored in some way in such scenes
by means of indexical or deictic signs (“that there,” “this here” etc.)
not immediately applicable to other situations. And, unlike the Der-
ridean approach, which begins and ends with a notion of frame-as-
paradox, Goffman’s is generative and originary: he suggests the ex-
istence of “primary frameworks” out of which develop still further,
more complex frames or modulations of those frames. These primary
frameworks are especially interesting for performatism because they
allow us to make an initial decision about events in reality and ren-
der “what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into
something that is meaningful.”17 The frameworks include an explicit
sacral dimension, the “astounding complex,” which suggests that the
first question we ask about any unusual action or event is whether it
might have a supernatural origin.18 Other primary frameworks relate
to “stunts” (whether an action is a well-executed performance or trick)
“flubs” (whether an action is a mistake) “fortuitousness” (whether an
action is a matter of luck) and what Goffman calls “tension” (whether
an action involving the body has an officially condoned social char-
acter or a sexual, proscribed one).19 The frameworks help us decide,
for example, whether the quick upward movement of someone’s right
arm is a religious blessing, a move in sport, an accident, or a natural
reflex.
As Goffman emphasizes, however, several frameworks can come
into consideration at any one time, and the transformations of the
basic frames or codes – their “keying” – makes it virtually impossible
to limit any action to a fixed, one-to-one relation. Goffman’s frames,
although not stable points of reference are, however, more than just
the accidental, transient incisions in the stream of human discourse
envisioned by Derrida. In fact, you could say that they are anchored
in reality in a way comparable to Eric Gans’s notion of the originary
scene, which is based on a spontaneous agreement to defer mimetic
rivalry through the emission of an ostensive sign (also a kind of index
sign pointing to a concrete, present thing and surrounded by a mini-
mal frame of social consensus). Taken this way, the ostensive scene
would provide the originary ground missing from Goffman’s theory,
which does not try to explain how the “astounding complex” came
about in the first place, or why it is even a primus inter pares within its
own category.20 Conversely, Goffman’s theory and observations serve
to remind us that ritual and sacrality continue to play a key role in
everyday life.
Goffman’s notion of frames is also useful in thinking about perfor-
matist subjectivity and plot development. At first, Goffman’s subject
might appear to be purely postmodern – the mere effect of a multitude
of overlapping and shifting frames not reducible to one single kernel
or core. However, the “Goffperson” is never so consumed by the dis-
course it uses so much as to lose all sense of orientation or decorum.21
As Goffman dryly remarks at the beginning of Frame Analysis, “all
the world is not a stage.”22 Just because we slip in and out of complex
sets of overlapping roles doesn’t mean that we get hopelessly lost in
them, or that fact and fiction are really equivalent, or that the possibil-
ity that something can be fabricated means that our everyday faith in
it must be vitiated. Our ability to find a firm “footing” or “anchoring”
(Goffman’s terms) in social interaction is possible because, unlike the
poststructuralists, Goffman also sees social frames in a ritual, sacral
dimension.23 This is rather different from a commonsense, namby-
pamby trust in convention which a poststructuralist would have no
problem confirming as a fact of social life. Indeed, Goffman, follow-
ing Durkheim, goes so far as to say that social interaction hinges on a
tacit agreement in everyday interactions to deify individual subjects:
“Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself
stubbornly remains as a deity of considerable importance.”24 Society,
in other words, is held together by individual subjects using frames
in a way that both enhance their own “divine” status and uphold the
decorum necessary to allow others to do the same. This Durkheimian
theme, which suggests that originary or archaic religion has a social,
rather than a cognitive, function, and that secular society’s functional
underpinnings are ultimately religious, can be found explicitly in mo-
nist thinkers like Gans and Sloterdijk and implicitly in many perfor-
matist narratives.25
By citing Goffman I don’t want to suggest that performatist plots
are more realistic or sociologically true to life than postmodern ones.
Performatist plots are however very often centered on breaches of a
frame that lead to a subject’s being deified either in the transcendent,
literal sense – as in American Beauty – or in a more figurative, so-
cial one. One interesting example of the latter is Thomas Vinterberg’s
Dogma 95 movie The Celebration, in which the main protagonist dis-
rupts the frame of a family gathering to accuse his father of having
molested him as a child. By sacrificing himself – by placing himself at
the center of attention and repeatedly causing himself to be expelled
from the family celebration – he eventually brings the other family
members over to his side; the father, by now himself demonized, is
forced permanently out of the family circle.26 These cases demonstrate
what I call a narrative performance: it marks the ability of a subject to
transcend a frame in some way, usually by breaking through it at some
point and/or reversing its basic parameters (in The Celebration the son
doesn’t replace the father at the center of power; having forced out the
patriarch, he opts to remain on the periphery of the family group). A
good formal definition of the “performance” in performatism is that it
demonstrates with aesthetic means the possibility of transcending the con-
ditions of a given frame (whether in a “realistic,” social or psychological
mode or in a fantastic, preternatural one).
At this point, a good deconstructionist would interject that if this
is so, then the ultimate proof of a performatist work would be its abili-
ty to transcend itself, i.e., to become something entirely dif ferent from
what it was to begin with. In purely epistemological terms this ob-
jection is irrefutable. However, it misses the point. For the new epoch
works first and foremost on an aesthetic, identificatory level, to create
an attitude of beautiful belief, and not on a cognitive, critical one. If
the performance is successful, then the reader too will identify with it
more or less involuntarily – even if he or she still remains incredulous
about its basic premises. The reader is “framed” in such a way that
belief trumps cognition.
Theist Plots
Because of its emphasis on transcending coercive frames rather

than continually transgressing porous, constantly shifting boundaries
(as is the case in postmodernism), performatism acquires a distinctly
theist cast. The basic plot common to all theist theologies is that a
personified male creator sets up a frame (the world) into which he
plunks inferior beings made in his own image; their task is in turn is
to transcend the frame and return to unify with the creator by imitat-
ing his perfection in some particular way. Deism, by contrast, suggests
that there is a breakdown of some kind in a unified origin which in
turn generates signs whose traces human beings must follow back to
their source; the basic plot structure is one of tracking signs in their
feminine formlessness and not imitating a transcendent father-figure
or phallus. I don’t wish to launch once more into the frequently made
comparison between postmodernism/poststructuralism and gnosti-
cism or the Cabbala. Rather, I would like to focus on how the new
monist aesthetic revives theist myths and reworks them in contem-
porary settings. Like other such performatist appropriations these are
obligated first to the logic of an aesthetic, authorial imperative and
only secondarily (if at all) to a dogmatic source. Performatism is an
aesthetic reaction to postmodernism’s one-sidedly deist bias and not
an old time camp meeting.
Since there are countless variants on the main theist plot I’ll re-
strict my remarks to five patterns that have been appearing regularly
in the last few years: playing God; escaping from a frame; returning
to the father; transcending through self-sacrifice; and perfecting the self.
These plot constructs are almost invariably ironic in the sense that
they couple an archaic theist myth with contemporary, secular twists
that don’t jive well with received dogma. Performatism, in other
words, creates a secondary, aesthetically motivated dogma and makes
it into the outer frame of a particular work. Although the irony of

this dogma is always apparent – its dogmatism is invariably a created,
artificial one running counter to tradition – it doesn’t vitiate itself or
“cross itself out” by virtue of this contradiction. Rather, as indicated
earlier, it points the viewer or reader back into the work itself to inner
scenes which in turn create a tautological lock or bind with the fixed
outer premise. The dif ference between postmodern and performatist
works is not that one is ironic and the other is not. Rather, it’s that
performatist irony is internal, circular, or scenic: it keeps you focused
on a set, “dogmatically” defined discrepancy rather than casting you
out into an infinite regress of belated misjudgments of what is going
on in and around the work.
In terms of plot, playing God is perhaps the most direct way of
emulating a transcendent, personified source. A fine example of this is
the movie Amelie, in which the eponymous heroine sets up little, con-
trived situations that help unhappy people change their lives for the
better (or, in one case, to punish a despotic bully). In contrast to what
one might expect from religious tradition, this doesn’t lead to acts of
hubris and abuse of power on the part of Amelie. Quite the contrary:
although she is successfully able to help others with her little traps, she
isn’t able to find true love herself. Only after her friends and co-work-
ers conspire to apply her tactics to her herself is she able to get together
with a monist Mr. Right (whose hobby consists of making ripped-up
representations whole – he pastes together pictures torn up and dis-
carded by people using automatic photo machines in train stations).
Playing God, in other words, only works after a group has imitated
the theist creatrix and projected her own strategy back onto herself.
The theist, active role is dependent on its acceptance and reapplication
by a social collective.
This basic problem of playing God – that even as a self-appointed
creator you can’t create happiness for yourself and others by fiat – is
treated at length in Lars von Trier’s Dogma 95 movie Idiots. There,
a group of young Danes living together in a commune go about
their town pretending to be social workers taking care of mentally
retarded patients. At first the group’s excursions serve little more
than to expose the vanity and insecurity of bourgeois existence by
transgressing against basic social decorum – a plot device that is still

entirely in keeping with postmodernism’s favoring of critical simula-
tion over smug projections about what is “real.” As the movie moves
on, though, it becomes clear that the real aim of the group is a kind
of radical self-therapy. The ultimate goal proclaimed by the group’s
messianistic leader is not to shock total strangers by simulating men-
tal retardation at the most embarrassing possible moment – and thus
simply to confirm your own otherness – but to do so in your own
familial and social sphere. Ultimately, the only member of the group
who succeeds in doing this is a shy, insecure young woman who has
just lost her baby. By drooling and slobbering like a retarded child at
her stiff, unfeeling family’s coffee hour she creates an ostensive sign of
solidarity with the dead infant while at the same time breaking with
the emotional indifference of her insufferable bourgeois family. This
transcendent narrative performance aimed at establishing a sense of
self – and not the theist imperative per se – is what makes the work
performative.
Another well-established theist plot device is escaping from a frame,
analogous to the task that a monotheist God places before people
trapped in the world of His making. The work of art closest to this
archetype is undoubtedly the Canadian cult movie Cube, in which
seven people find themselves placed for no apparent reason in a gigan-
tic labyrinth of cubes which they have to get out of before they starve
to death. The only person who succeeds is, significantly, autistic; he
is someone who is socially dysfunctional while having the surest sense
of his own self. (The positive reduction of subjectivity to a minimal,
invulnerable core of self hood is impossible in postmodernism, where
the subject can experience itself only in terms of other signs set by an
infinitely receding symbolic Other.) This ubiquitous plot device link-
ing transcendence and the overcoming of closed space can be found
in a whole slew of works that will be treated in more detail later in the
book; these include the movies Panic Room and Russian Ark (Chapter
Three) as well as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Olga Tokarczuk’s short
story “Hotel Capital” (Chapter Two).
A more personified, gender-specific variant of the same myth is
the plot involving a return to the Father (or the Mother, as the case
may be27). As a rule, in performatism we find highly constructed fa-

ther-son relationships involving a parity or reversal of strength rather
than the oppressive, phallic rule of the Father assumed by Lacan and
his feminist interpreters. The most notable example of a constructed
return is the movie version of Cider House Rules, in which the father-
figure, Dr. Larch, uses his position as director of an orphanage to
set up one of his charges, Homer Wells, as an ersatz-son. Both part
ways over a typical theist dilemma – the son thinks that Dr. Larch’s
practice of performing abortions means playing God in a negative
sense. However, both are reconciled after Homer is himself forced to
play God and choose between performing an abortion and delivering
an incestuously conceived child. Armed with a phony CV concocted
by Dr. Larch, who has in the meantime died, Homer completes the
cycle and returns to head the orphanage as a new, benevolent theist
creator/destroyer.
A positive transfer of power between fathers and sons is also evi-
dent in Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories (see Chapter Two) as well as in
movies like The Celebration and American Beauty. In the latter, the
true father-figure of the movie turns out to be Ricky Fitts, whom both
Lester and Colonel Fitts imitate (Lester takes dope-dealing Ricky as
his hedonist idol and the Colonel tries to imitate his son’s presumed
affair with Lester). In the fictional world of the movie, both these
projections are psychologically false but have a metaphysically true
focus: Ricky, in spite of his cynical hobbies, is a kind of living portal
to God and beauty. As he himself says regarding his video of a dead
homeless woman: “When you see something like that, it’s like God
is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful, you
can look right back.” And what he sees when he looks right back is
“beauty.”28 Evidently, a basic metaphysical optimism is at work here
suggesting that it is always possible for sons to reverse positions of rela-
tive weakness vis-à-vis their fathers or Father. Ricky’s ability to look
back at God would be impossible in a Lacanian or Foucauldian world
where the Gaze or panoptical vision can never be returned in any sort
of adequate, let alone aesthetically satisfying way.29
Another important performatist plot motif is that of transcend-
ing through self-sacrifice. In postmodernism, the victim is always the
peripheralized other of a hegemonial, oppressive center; the victim

more or less automatically acquires moral and epistemological superi-
ority by virtue of its decentered, peripatetic status as the near helpless
target of whatever force the center exerts on it.30 In performatism,
victims are once more centered; that is, we are made to focus on them
as objects of positive identification rather than as markers of endlessly
receding alterity and resistance. Here as elsewhere in the new monism,
this recentering is itself an eccentric move that is markedly at odds
with religious tradition.
Two of the most radical exponents of sacrificial centering are the
Dogma 95 directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. In Vinter-
berg’s The Celebration it is the suicide of the hero’s sister that motivates
his own less drastic act of exposing himself to public embarrassment;
in this way the absent, absolute victim is once more recentered in a way
that makes her sacrifice negotiable with the collective – and allows the
expulsion of the morally debased patriarch from its midst. Thus the
traditional mediating role of Christ – the hero’s name is Christian, in
case anyone has missed the point – is expanded to include a unity of
male and female working towards the common goal of evacuating a
corrupt, exploitative center. Similarly, almost every movie made by
Lars von Trier centers around acts of female self-sacrifice. The most
drastic example is his auteur tearjerker Dancer in the Dark, where we
are set up in a deliberately heavy-handed way to identify with the final
sacrificial transaction of the heroine – trading off her own life to save
the sight of her son. A complete reversal in terms of plot construction
is von Trier’s no-less dogmatic Dogville, where a female victim is able
to return to a fatherly center of criminal power – and responds by
promptly wiping out her tormentors down to the last man, woman,
and child.
As is the case with the father-son relationship, performatism suggests
a reversibility of center-periphery or victim-perpetrator positions that
isn’t possible in postmodernism, where alterity leads to victimization
and victimization to still more alterity (and where nobody in his or
her right mind would even bother to identify with the “hegemonial”
center). Generally speaking, performatism is no less critical of abuses
of power in the center than is postmodernism. However, it recognizes
the identificatory value of sacrificial centering that is completely alien

to the ethos of postmodernism, which can only conceive of viable
moral positions being established on the run and on the periphery of
the social order. Performatism, by contrast, allows for a centering that
establishes a proximity between victims and perpetrators – and allows
perpetrators, too, to become the object of reader or viewer identifica-
tion. In Chapter Two I will treat a typical postmodern victimary
scenario, Ali Smith’s Hotel World and its performatist antipode, Olga
Tokarczuk’s “The Hotel Capital,” and examine the moral problems
involved in a framed erotic relationship between victim and perpetra-
tor in my discussion of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.
Performatist plots don’t necessarily have to tap into Western, mono-
theist myths. A plot pattern in works drawing on Easter philosophy
and religion is that of perfecting the self, usually in the sense of com-
muning with an animate nature or entering or approaching Nirvana.
This takes place most explicitly in Jim Jarmusch’s movie Ghost Dog
and Viktor Pelevin’s novel Buddha’s Little Finger,31 which is arguably
the most important work of post-Soviet fiction in Russia to date. In
Ghost Dog the eponymous hero, a black ghetto dweller, adheres rigidly
to the Samurai code of the Hagakure requiring absolute obeisance to
a “master”; in this case, circumstances have obligated him to serve
a low-level Mafia family member as a hired killer. Even after he has
been betrayed by his mafia employers (whom he then systematically
eliminates), his strict code of honor doesn’t allow him to betray his
“master,” who in the end shoots him without the hero offering any
resistance. Before deliberately sacrificing himself, Ghost Dog however
manages to pass on his code of honor to a small girl who will presum-
ably continue to develop it in a less violent way. Ghost Dog can only
develop so far within the confines of a rigidly framed self, which the
hero voluntarily gives up after its possibilities have been expended; his
conscious self-sacrifice serves to further the perfection of the world as
a whole.32 At the end of Pelevin’s novel, by contrast, the hero and his
sidekick leave a burlesque, dually constructed world and enter directly
into Nir vana (a plot resolution repeated in many other of his works).
Many readers choose to ignore these authoritative monist resolutions
and treat his novels and stories as exercises in undecidable postmodern
irony. However, it would seem that he is entirely serious in his desire

to force readers to adopt a Buddhist mindset – if only within an aes-
thetic frame that flirts with the possibility of converting the reader in
real life.
Theist Narrative
Because of their dogmatic posture performatist narratives create

certain odd configurations that stand out against the background of
both traditional and postmodern story-telling techniques. One of the
most curious such devices is first-person authorial narration, an “im-
possible” device in which a narrator equipped with powers similar
to those of an all-powerful, omniscient author forces his or her own
authoritative point of view upon us in what is usually a circular or
tautological way. 33 A prime example of this can be found in the narra-
tive structure of American Beauty. At the film’s beginning we see the
bird’s-eye view of a small town and hear a detached, almost meditative
voice saying: “My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood.
This is my street. This... is my life. I’m forty-two years old. In less than
a year I’ll be dead.” As the first scene of the film appears, Lester’s voice
adds: “Of course, I don’t know that yet.”34 Lester’s tranquility is made
possible by the holism of the narrative framework, which is oblivious
to the difference between implicit author and character – and hence
to death itself.
In this way even the evacuation or destruction of characters serves
to strengthen the whole; after his murder by Colonel Fitts Lester dis-
solves into the authorial frame, from which he reemerges to introduce
the story from a personal perspective in which he is again murdered.
The act of narrating itself becomes a circular, enclosed act of belief
that cannot be made the object of a metaphysical critique or decon-
struction without destroying the substance of the work itself (Life of
Pi, which is treated at length in Chapter Two, has a similar structure,
as does Ian McEwan’s Atonement 35). The narrative is constructed in
such a way that the viewer has no choice but to transcend his or her
own disbelief and accept the performance represented by the film as
a kind of aesthetically mediated apriori. This transformation of the
viewing or reading process into an involuntary act of belief stands

in direct contrast to the postmodern mode of the virtual, where the
observer can’t believe anything because ontological parameters like au-
thor, narrator, and character have been dissolved in an impenetrable
web of paradoxical assignations and cross-references (as happens to
the hapless private detective Quinn in Paul Auster’s City of Glass).
In terms of reader response, performatist narratives must create
an ironclad construct whose inner lock or fit cannot be broken by the
reader without destroying the work as a whole. The performatist nar-
rative, in other words, makes you decide for a certain posture vis-à-vis
the text, whereas the no less manipulative postmodern device of unde-
cidability keeps you from deciding what posture to take. The master of
this “idiot-proof” narrative form in performatism is Viktor Pelevin,
who revels in tricking readers into assuming positions that turn out
to be Buddhist ones forcing them to transcend their everyday secular
mindset. Of these, the most insidious is perhaps the (as of now un-
translated) short story “Tambourine of the Lower World.”36 There the
reader, in the course of a rambling monologue on Brezhnev, light rays,
mirrors, and death, is encouraged to memorize the curious phrase con-
tained in the title. At the end of the story the narrator reveals that he
has constructed a prismatic device activated precisely by this phrase
and focusing a mental death ray on the reader; the ray may however be
deactivated by sending 1,000 dollars to a dubious-sounding address.
Those who treat this threat as a joke are encouraged to “divide up
your time into hours and try not to think of the phrase ‘tambourine
of the lower world’ for exactly sixty seconds.”37 As in most of his other
short stories, Pelevin forces the reader to enter involuntarily into the
Buddhist project of transcending the material world entirely; in addi-
tion, the story demonstrates the impossibility of forgetting a mental
image or projection after it has been framed within a short span of
time.
Many readers still consider Pelevin to be postmodern because of
his narrative playfulness and satirical jabs at post-Soviet society; they
also distrust the motives of the real-life author, who undeniably in-
dulges in self-mystification. However, a wealth of stories – including
“serious” ones likes his “Ontology of Childhood”38 – makes clear that
his focus remains consistently on the Buddhist goal of self-annihila-

tion and not on the eternal regress of the subject common to post-
modernism. Thus in the short story “Hermit and Six-Toes”39 we are
party to a series of mystical dialogues pertaining to life in what seems
to be a dismal prison camp. Towards the end of the story we discover
however that the two protagonists are chickens who are eventually
able to “transcend” by training themselves to fly out of their pen.
Here, as in many other cases in performatism, we are forced to occupy
a superior, theist perspective towards “lower” characters. The manifest
ability of these lower characters to transcend is then reflected back
onto us as a performative imperative: as a challenge to become some-
thing completely dif ferent from what we are now. (This device can be
found in American Beauty as well as the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who
Wasn’t There, which I’ll examine in greater detail in Chapter Three.)
Obviously, not all performatist narratives depend on these kind
of one-shot tricks ascribing impossible acts of transcendence to nar-
rators, characters, and texts. However, even in “realistic” works we
can observe that first-person narrators and central, weak characters
tend to become invested with more and more authorial authority as
the work progresses – a development that is directly at odds with the
tendency of postmodern heroes and heroines to unravel, split up, or
dissolve in outside contexts (and with the tendency of the authorial
positions accompanying them to do the same). Because the analysis of
psychologically motivated narrative in performatism requires a careful
consideration of character development as a whole, I’ll return to the
problem of authorial empowerment of “weak” characters in more de-
tail in my treatments of individual literary works, most notably Ingo
Schulze’s Simple Stories and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader as well as
Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Hotel Capital” (Chapter Two).
Theist Creation in Architecture and the Visual Arts
The theist mode is not only active in narrative, but manifests itself
strikingly in architectonic structures suggesting that the omnipotent
hand of a higher being is at work – an architect playing God rath-
er than playing hard to get, as is the case in postmodernism. As in
performatist narrative, the basic aim of this new kind of architecture

is to evoke a constructed or artificial experience of transcendence in
the viewer; you are supposed to feel the powerful, preterhuman hand
of the architect rather than reflect on the interplay of ornamentally
familiar forms, as in postmodernism, or be transformed by a com-
pelling functional principle, as in modernism. I have isolated at least
nine different devices that the new architecture uses to impress this
sublime feeling of transcendence upon the viewer; they’ll be discussed
in more detail in Chapter Four. For the time being it will suffice to
note that most can be subsumed under the concept of what might
be called “transcendent functionalism” or “transcendent ornamen-
talism.” Performatist architecture takes individual spatial features or
forms that are already familiar from architectural history and uses
them in a way that accentuates the possibility of the impossible rather
than ironic knowledge of the undecidable. Hence in the new archi-
tectures building parts may move (static becomes dynamic), trian-
gular structures are tilted (stable becomes unstable), a glass, purely
ornamental facade is placed in front of the real facade (a solid plane
dematerializes), or egg or oval shapes are employed (suggesting imper-
fect originary wholeness rather than rigid geometric functionality).
Large chunks may also be sliced out of a building (suggesting the
hand of a theist creator); empty frames may imply the act of theist con-
struction as such while transcending the opposition between inside
and out. Instead of irony and play we are confronted with a “satu-
rated,” paradoxical experience of sublimity and beauty that forces us
to change our intuitive perception of seemingly quotidian “givens.”40
Buildings of this kind may seem to point at, topple on, aim at, or
otherwise threaten their users even as they suggest the possibility of a
transcendent, incomprehensible force at work. Simple, but no longer
rigidly geometric forms like ovals or lemon shapes suggest originary
harmony and beauty rather than functional, mathematically dictated
rigor. These structures can be said to perform in the sense that they
induce us to experience these sublime feelings using obviously con-
structed, artificial means. This sublimity is in turn postmetaphysical; it
is the result of specifically aesthetic, artificial strategies and need not
have any specific theological pretensions.
In the visual arts, performatism has developed in reaction to con-

cept art and what is often called anti-art, both of which one-sidedly
dominated the art scene from the 1970s well into the 1990s. In a way
comparable to that of narrative performatism, performatist art and
photography visually bracket off concept and context and force view-
ers to accept the inner givens of the work at hand. Unlike modernism,
where certain qualities such as flatness, abstraction, or reduction were
considered essential expressions of beauty, in performatism these inner
givens are constructs that are not reducible to any essential qualities.
In turn, these constructs are forced on the viewer in such a way that
he or she has no choice but to accept their autonomy from a context
– which is to say their aestheticity. Vanessa Beecroft’s closed, obses-
sive-compulsive nude performances, Thomas Demand’s photographs
of evocative cardboard interiors, and the action-packed, but weirdly
incomprehensible paintings of Neo Rauch all share this same basic set
towards reality. The inner space of the painting/photo/performance
creates a new way of seeing or experiencing the world that can at first
only be experienced in terms of a constructed aesthetic interior. If ac-
cepted by the viewer, this interiority may then be projected back onto
the outside contexts around it. Interiority, then, determines context
and not the other way around. Just how this works in visual, rather
than narrative, terms will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter
Six.
Performatist Sex
In performatism there is a markedly different approach to sex

and gender than is the case in postmodernism and poststructural-
ism. Poststructuralist theory, of course, emphasizes the primacy of
belated, constructed, heterogeneous sexual role-playing (gender) over
preexisting, binarily defined corporeal identity (sex). And, as usual,
poststructuralism confronts us with an epistemological critique of es-
sentialism or naturalization that at first glance seems hard to beat.
Here we would appear to have two choices. The first is to dissolve
sexuality and corporeality into an endless, unstable regress of discur-
sive assignations – the happy hunting grounds of deconstruction and
postfeminism. The second is to stipulate exactly what the natural,

preexisting features of sexuality would be in every case – an impos-
sible task considering that the very signs we need to do this continu-
ally contaminate the presumably natural essence of sexuality with our
own belatedly acquired cultural biases. The question arises as to how
a monist concept of sexuality is possible that doesn’t achieve unity by
positing a neat fit between the stable, heterosexually founded binary
opposition between male and female.
The key to performatist sexuality lies once more in double fram-
ing, in creating an artificial unity that forces us to accept temporarily
the validity of peculiar sexual or erotic constructs while making them
the focus of our involuntary identification. Here as elsewhere it’s useful
to take a quick look at postmodern theory and practice before turning
to the alternative offered by performatism. In postfeminist theory (as
exemplified by Judith Butler), a dominant, heterosexual field of power
is thought to project its unified, hegemonic imperative onto subjects
presenting heterogeneous substrates not reducible to a simple binary
scheme of male/female. Due to the sheer force exerted by the hegemon-
ic matrix resistance to this compartmentalization can take place only
in weak, by definition unsuccessful performances that manage to turn
some of the dominant system’s coercive energy against itself without re-
ally placing it in doubt. The real discursive achievement is located less in
the performance itself (which is a function of the dominant power ma-
trix) than in a melancholy, metaphysically pessimistic metaposition that
unflinchingly records the insufficiency of simulatory resistance while
at the same time touting it as the only possible means of undermining
the “heterosexual matrix.” Ali Smith’s Hotel World, which I use as a foil
for a discussion of performatism in Chapter Two, has made this post-
feminist metaposition into its main narrative premise.
Performatism as I understand it is less an ideological reaction to
postfeminism than a strategic one. The point of performatism is not
to roll back multifarious gender constellations into good old binary
sex, but rather to frame or construct them in such a way that they
stand out positively within the framework of the “heterosexual ma-
trix” (or whatever other dominant power structure happens to be at
hand). The main strategy involved in this is centering the other. Instead
of automatically equating the other with the marginal and the weak,
performatism takes otherness and plops it directly into the middle of
the interlocked frames I’ve already discussed above. Thus at the social
center of American Beauty we find the “two Jims” – a hearty, healthy,
happy gay pair who because of their unified, but plural, gendering can
be all things to all characters (they chat about cultivating roses with
Caroline and give tips on physical fitness to Lester). Many critics have
noted how this positive portrayal of a gay partnership amidst mani-
festly unhappy heterosexual marriages parodies middle-class subur-
ban values. However, from a performatist perspective it’s even more
important to emphasize that the two Jims also overcome the violent
tension inherent in what Girard calls mimetic rivalry. As doubles in
both name and sexual orientation, one would normally expect the two
Jims at some point to incur the wrath of the collective (in Girardian
thinking, twins and doubles embody the mimetic, contagious vio-
lence which society must constantly seek to assuage by victimizing
scapegoats). In this case, though, exactly the opposite is true: the two
Jims serve as a model not just for characters like Lester and Caroline
but also, it would seem, for Colonel Fitts; the success of their relation-
ship holds forth the promise of a successful “partnership” between the
Colonel and Lester.
American Beauty takes the sameness contained in homosexual
otherness and makes it the unified center of its metaphysical universe;
mimesis becomes a positive, reconciliatory mechanism and not a dan-
gerous, competitive one. Colonel Fitts doesn’t murder Lester because
of mimetic rivalry with someone else; he murders him because he is
a disappointed lover – the most believable extenuating circumstance
you can have in a metaphysically optimistic universe. By framing and
centering homosexual relationships in this way – by giving them a
“divine,” privileged position vis-à-vis heterosexual ones – American
Beauty suggests a world in which gender and sex can be transcended
entirely. Whether or not this will ever take place in the real world
is entirely another matter. However, the performance marking it is
centered for all to see, and its aesthetic mediation can make it palat-
able even to those who find the union of two same-sexed individuals
distasteful in real life.
This centering of otherness in performatism applies not only to

role-playing and gender, but also to genitalia and genetics. The stan-
dard argument advanced in this regard by Butler and other postfemi-
nists is to freely acknowledge the existence of genetic and corporeal
influence on discursively determined gender. However, close on the
heels of this concession follows a clause effectively rendering it void.
For if genetics and the body do act upon discourse, it is then our
solemn epistemological duty to determine the exact point where this
influence sets in – and that is something we can only do with the help
of more heaping portions of non-natural discourse. Arguments sup-
porting a corporeal or genetic privileging of nature over culture can
then be neatly disposed of by pointing out the impossibility of ever
being able to conceive of corporeality entirely outside of a continually
proliferating, uncontrollable discourse that you yourself have been
busy piling up in the first place.
Performatism doesn’t “correct” this privileging of discourse by flatly
propagating nature over nurture or calling for a return to good old bi-
nary heterosexuality. What it does do, though, is to frame corporeality
– and in particular genitally defined corporeality – in such a way that
genetic and genital issues are moved to the center of narrative frames
and made into vehicles for a transcendent event. A prime example of
this can be found once more in the basic plot structure of American
Beauty. Lester sets up a hedonist frame around himself designed to
culminate in the seduction of Angela Hays, who at first appears to be a
little more than a slutty version of her homonymic cousin Lolita Haze.
Upon realizing that Angela is a virgin (and a very insecure one, at that),
Lester however retracts his phallic desire, transcending as he does so
his own libidinal self to become something higher and more moral
(indeed, you could say, he becomes an adult again). The fact that he is
murdered immediately after that by Colonel Fitts doesn’t diminish his
feat. It simply means he can’t be all things to all people at once – in a
different context the very same act of chasteness exhibited vis-à-vis An-
gela turns out to be a mortal insult. In a postmodernist work, this sort
of contextualization would vitiate Lester’s attempt to establish himself
as an autonomous subject. In performatism, however, this contextual
paradoxality is explicitly transcended. Lester is deified at the movie’s
end and enters into a higher, beautiful realm for which his multi-sexual
chasteness seems an entirely appropriate rite of preparation.
Another quick way of highlighting the differences between
postmodernism and performatism regarding sex is to key in on the
topic of hermaphroditism. While not exactly a pressing social issue
in itself, hermaphroditism has attracted the attention of such promi-
nent theoreticians as Foucault and Butler because it seems to embody
the main empirical premise behind postmodernism’s concept of gen-
der: namely, that our natural sexuality is a toss-up that a sinister set
of encultured norms consistently causes to land on the heterosexual
side of the coin. Foucault and Butler, to be sure, disagree on whether
Herculine Barbin’s hermaphroditism is the “happy limbo of non-iden-
tity”41 (Foucault) or just another example of one-sided sexuality being
forced on a hapless victim (Butler).42 However, the root idea remains
the same: the hermaphrodite is about as close as anyone can get to a
state of reified otherness exposing the arbitrariness of prevailing het-
erosexual norms.43
The most programmatic performatist reaction to the postmodern
concept of hermaphroditism has up to now been Jeffrey Eugenides’
widely acclaimed novel Middlesex.44 Eugenides, who is familiar with
Foucault’s arguments (and probably also Butler’s), switches the frame
of reference from one of undecidable, irreducible alterity to one of
decidable, albeit defective unity. Eugenides’ underage heroine makes
a conscious decision to become a male, basing this choice on scientifi-
cally founded anatomical data that has been concealed from her by a
typically postmodern doctor. Like Lester Burnham, she deliberately
becomes a male with a (this time permanently) retracted penis, a man
who by the end of the book is capable of loving without penetrating
the object of his desire. Additionally, the hero proves to be a person ca-
pable of ethnic reconciliation. Of Greek ancestry, he eventually moves
to Berlin where he lives amicably among the Turks who had once
slaughtered his ancestors and indirectly set off the incestuous relation
between his grandparents that led to his anatomical – but not intel-
lectual – dualism.
Rather than appealing to genetically encoded heterosexuality,
performatism seeks to transcend sexual difference by resorting to
strategies ranging everywhere from chastity to genetic engineering

to divine intervention. Instead of acting as a place of liminal un-
decidability and boundary transgression the body becomes a scene
of potential unity, irrespective of the “input” involved. Thus in Olga
Tokarczuk’s heavily Jungian novel House of Day, House of Night45 we
encounter the figure of Saint Kummernis, who is miraculously en-
dowed with a girl’s body and Jesus’s head and who dies a martyr’s death
because of it; in Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles46 the
main character succeeds in cloning a unisexed person who overcomes
the sexual tension involved in conventional male-female relations. In
one of the most absurd performatist plays with sexual identity, in the
movie Being John Malkovich, a woman who is inhabiting John Mal-
kovich’s “portal” manages to impregnate her girlfriend through the
actor and have a child (who can in turn be used as a kind of vessel in
which fortunate people can live forever once they have entrance to it).
These are not mere gender shifts or weak, refractory “performances”
creating small swirls in the power flow of a mighty heterosexual ma-
trix, but whole, albeit incredible constructions of sexuality aimed at
overcoming sexuality’s most frustrating and perplexing aspects. These
transcendency-breeding frames are, in effect, a logical consequence
of the radical dualist constructivism propagated by Butler. For once
you kiss the corporeal world goodbye – once you start constructing
gender relations willy-nilly without regard for their genetic or material
substrate – there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go one step further
and reconstruct these relations as monist ones that once more include
the body within them. As long as your unified new construct focuses
on transcending sexuality as we know it – and not simply on reinstall-
ing the old binary, heterosexual opposition between male and female
– you will be a sexual performatist. Because these monist constructs
by definition allow for a secondary pluralism – each whole construct
is different in its own way – there is no dearth of possibilities to con-
struct sexuality anew without one-sidedly tipping the scales in favor
of homosexuality by default (as does Butler’s postfeminism) or het-
erosexuality by decree (as does traditional Judeo-Christian culture).
Performatism holds out the promise of a plurality of sexual preference
in which body and soul both turn out to matter.
Performatist Time and History
Most scholars and critics today will readily admit that writing,
film-making, art, and architecture are different today than they were
back in, say, 1990, not to speak of 1985 or 1980. None of these ob-
servers, however, would dream of suggesting that these dif ferences are
epochal in nature – part of a massive paradigm shift fundamentally
changing the way we regard and represent the world around us. In-
stead, in discussions of cultural trends we invariably encounter a kind
of one-step-for ward, one-step-back attitude towards any thing lay-
ing a claim to innovation. Since in postmodern thinking every thing
New is by definition always already implicated in the Old, it’s easy
to dispose of performatism – or anything else promising novelty, for
that matter – by dragging its individual concepts back into the good
old briar patch of citations, traces, and uncontrollable filiations that
make up postmodernism. This posthistorical “yes,-but” attitude is so
entrenched in present-day criticism that even such vociferous monist
opponents of posthistoricism as Walter Benn Michaels in America
and Boris Groys in Germany haven’t been able to counter it with posi-
tive programs of their own. After introducing a promising monist
concept of the new in 2000, for example, Groys has not developed it
further.47 Michaels, for his part, ends a recent polemical book on a
note of complete resignation, stating that “history, as of this writing,
is still over.”48
Needless to say, I believe that history is nowhere close to being
over. At the moment, history is being energetically pump-primed by
writers, architects, artists and filmmakers who have – consciously or
unconsciously – switched to a monist mindset and are work ing with
frames and ostensivity to inaugurate a new, manifestly unpostmodern
aesthetic of temporality. This performatist switch is generating new
concepts of time in two crucial areas: in literary history itself and
in cinematography, where temporal experience is aesthetically most
palpable.
History
Of the varied postmodern concepts of time and history that

may be extracted from the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze,
Jameson and others, the most fundamental undoubtedly remains
that of dif férance – the state of temporal and spatial undecidability in
which, as Derrida cagily puts it, “one loses and wins on every turn.”49
In différance, as hardly needs to be repeated at length any more, space
and time are perceived as mutually conditioning one another from the
very moment of their appearance as intelligible concepts in language.
Mark a move in time and you’ll have created a new spatial position;
create a new spatial position and you’ll have needed an increment of
time to do it. Deconstruction inter venes to disrupt the “metaphysi-
cal” tendency to privilege one over the other and, of course, to de-
stabilize any historical “ism” that would try to treat a discrete block
of time as a “static and taxonomic tabularization,”50 as Derrida calls
it. The net effect, as we know, is a concept of history that is radically
posthistorical and radically incremental, since the only thing that can
really “happen” – the only true transcendent event – is the destruc-
tion of discourse itself. In the Derridean scenario even the buildup to
nuclear war follows the pattern of différance, since it’s all just discourse
– up to the point, at least, where the bombs actually go off.51 Because
there’s nothing outside of deconstructive discourse except death, be-
ing inside that discourse is, conversely, a kind of key to cultural im-
mortality. And, because that discourse can never be superseded by
anything short of death, using any other discourse that might come
after it would presumably be like being dead. The difference between
postmodern discourse of this kind and every thing else isn’t just a mat-
ter of how you use signs to convey reality in a certain way: it’s a matter
of intellectual life and death.
The monist notion of history I am suggesting here is not as deadly
serious about its own truth claims as is current theory. Adopting a
monist set towards the sign instead of a dualist one doesn’t mean that
we’re going back to a naïve metaphysics deferring to God, History,
Truth, Beauty, or some other comforting notion residing outside the
purview of our discourse. The belief that material reality should be
incorporated into the sign instead of being excluded from it is a re-

curring feature of human thought that can be observed in Western
culture since Antiquity; it is “true” only inasmuch as large groups of
people adopt it for certain periods of time and stick to it until they get
tired of it again.
At the same time, the epochal concept of history I would like to
develop here is also not as arbitrarily personal as someone like Stanley
Fish makes it out to be. People adopt a set towards signs “with” or
“without” things well before they make the kind of free-wheeling,
wildly diverging interpretations that led Fish to pose his famous query
“is their a text in this class?”52 At some point, everyone decides – usu-
ally intuitively – on whether to be a semiotic monist or a semiotic
dualist. And, having done so, everyone also tends to stay that way
for considerable lengths of time – whether due to a desire for internal
consistency or due to sheer intellectual inertia. The issue at hand is
not that a few scholars here and there have decided to adopt a monist
mindset and apply it for their own personal or institutional ends; it’s
that writers, moviemakers, and architects all over have adopted this
mindset and are implementing it in works of art. The changes now oc-
curring in culture are epochal in nature: they represent a fundamental
shift in the way we approach the world. However, because of their
obligation to postmodern norms, very few critics are in a position to
accept that shift as something desirable, and still less to define it as
an historical event, rather than as a mere set of incremental changes.
This applies no less to those affecting a critical stance towards post-
modernism. Although it has by now become fashionable to dismiss
postmodernism as exhausted or obsolete, this attitude means nothing
if it is not accompanied by a positive alternative position. If you can’t
define the Other of postmodernism and write, think, and act in terms
of that Other then you are – sorry to say – still a postmodernist.
In discussions of epochs it is always tempting to link normative
shifts from dualism to monism (and back again) with larger trends in
socio-political reality. In the case of postmodernism, the main repre-
sentative of this materialist line of thought has been Fredric Jameson,
who sought to escape the poststructuralist “prison-house of language”
by welding a lucid, highly convincing account of postmodernism
onto the Unterbau of what he called late capitalism. Unfortunately

for Jameson’s thesis, late capitalism – its ominous name notwithstand-
ing – has been looking increasingly robust with each passing year.
The fact that postmodernism is petering out while global capitalism
continues to boom suggests that Jameson’s Marxist reading of cultural
history is not much more prescient than the deconstructive one: it
simply installs never-ending posthistory in the material realm outside
the sign.
Given the collapse of socialism and the present lack of any viable
alternative to the capitalist mode of production, it is tempting to sug-
gest that the turn towards globalization and the turn towards a monist
culture are two sides of the same coin (this is, in fact, the position tak-
en by Eric Gans with his ambitious notion of post-millennialism53).
Since performatism is a theory of aesthetics – a theory of why we like
certain things for no good practical reason – I don’t find it neces-
sary to make such far-reaching claims. It is true, of course, that many
performatist works treated in this book feed off of problems arising
through globalization and/or the collapse of socialism in Middle and
Eastern Europe. However, it is also important to remember that there
is no urgent practical reason why artists should not keep on thumbing
their noses at capitalism using the tried-and-true strategies developed
in postmodernism (Ali Smith’s Hotel World, discussed in Chapter
Two, is a good example of a “classic,” politically correct postmodern
approach to the subject).
In my view, the main reason for the switch to monism is that cre-
ative artists have become tired of recycling increasingly predictable
postmodernist devices and have turned to its monist Other to con-
struct alternatives – a move that ultimately knows no ideological
boundaries. Hence, in the new monism we find a whole gamut of
political positions, ranging from Eric Gans’s strident neoconservatism
to Arundhati Roy’s Chomskian critique of American power poli-
tics. The criterion for performatism is ultimately not whether you are
for or against global capitalism, but how you go about formulating
your position within it. In Chapter Two, I’ll discuss in more detail
some literary works with historiographic and political implications.
Roughly speaking, though, you can make out three positions here:
an accommodationist one that seeks to create warmed air pockets of

spirituality within the glacial impassivity of global capitalism (Tokar-
czuk’s “The Hotel Capital,” Schulze’s Simple Stories); a postcolonial
one that focuses on creating beautiful unities amidst the moral and
political ugliness of the capitalist system (Arundhati Roy’s The God
of Small Things, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog); and a terrorist or sublime
one, which toys on a fictional level with the possibility of doing away
with capitalism altogether (Miloš Urban’s Sevenchurch and Viktor
Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger). Finally, in the discussion of Bernhard
Schlink’s The Reader, I’ll show how Schlink tries to overcome the vic-
timary politics arising out of the Holocaust and open up the possibil-
ity of individual subjects advancing in history frame by frame.
Cinematographic Time
In aesthetic terms we experience time most intensely in the cin-

ema. Here, too, performatism is changing the way time, space, and
the medium of film interact. Up until now, sophisticated viewers have
felt most comfortable with the deist notion of dispersed or disjointed
time used by postmodernism. Because in deist thinking the spatial
markers of divine origin – its signs or traces – are believed to prolifer-
ate incrementally and uncontrollably in every which way, the time
in which that proliferation unfolds never has much of a chance to
develop epic, drawn-out proportions.54 In (post-)modern deist systems
time is either being constantly sliced and diced by space, as in Der-
rida’s différance, or removed from chronology and interiorized, as in
Bergson’s durée (which he links with the ability to engage in creative
imagination per se). The most ingenious and productive postmodern
theory of cinematic time, the one developed by Deleuze in his two
“cinema” books, is more gracious in its attitude towards chronological
time – he regards the epic “movement-image” of pre-war cinema and
the “time-image” of postmodern cinema as different but equal.55 How-
ever, it is obvious that Deleuze’s sympathies lie with the neo-Bergso-
nian “time-image” that shatters the sensory-motor scheme “from the
inside”56 and causes time to go “out of joint.”57 Deleuze’s opposition,
which is grounded in an exacting and exhaustive treatment of 80 years
of cinematic innovation, would also seem to leave us in a typical post-

historical bind. Either cinema can continue to produce the out-of-kil-
ter time-images typical of the 1970s and ’80s or it can fall back into
the old sensory-motor patterns of pre-war film – or, even worse, recur
to the pedestrian, merely chronological use of cinematic time that has
always been a mainstay of popular movies. How can filmmakers cre-
ate a cinematic time not based on the serial montage of sensory motor
images or disjointed, temporal ones?
The answer, once more, lies in framing time in a way that is alien
to postmodernism and poststructuralism. The focus is on creating pre-
sence – which is to say on doing something that the Derridean, episte-
mological critique of time considers impossible and the normative,
Bergsonian-Deleuzian concept of time considers insipid.
Just how does this work? For a start, we are not dealing with a na-
ive attempt to create a primary presence. There is no way that modern-
day cinema-goers are going to be shocked, fooled, or cajoled into mix-
ing up reality and its filmic representation. Performatist film does
not try to convince us that it is representing reality in a more “real”
or “authentic” way than any previous cinematic school or direction.
Rather, performatist film functions by framing and contrasting two
types of time: personal or human time and theist or authorial time.
Put more concretely, the performatist film, using the usual coercive
means, forces viewers to accept a certain segment of time as a unity
or “chunk” while at the same time providing them with a temporal
perspective that transcends that temporal unity. The relevant mode
here is not epistemological and reflexive, but ontological and intuitive:
it is the feeling of being present in a time frame that is qualitatively
superior in some way to a previous one.
The most radical example of this is Alek sandr Sokurov’s movie
Russian Ark, which consists of one 87-minute-long, completely uncut
shot. While watching the movie, we are made to experience two times.
The first is the real time of the cameraman as he slowly moves through
the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg; the second is the “staged”
time of the director as he places a whole series of historical figures and
scenes from Russia’s czarist past in the path of the passing camera. On
the one hand, we plunge with the cameraman into an ever-expanding
filmic present corresponding exactly to the real time of the filming

procedure (there was no editing and hence no way of shortening or
scrambling real time). On the other hand, the mise en scène confronts
us with characters who can only be interpreted as emblems of transcen-
dent, panchronological time: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great,
Pushkin, Nicholas II, and a hodge-podge of other figures taken from
Russian history all appear within the same 87-minute sequence. The
net effect (which I’ll discuss in greater detail in Chapter Three) is that
of a quotidian, real time allowing us to participate in a transcendent,
supra historical one. The key to temporal experience here is the en bloc
juxtaposition of theist and human time rather than the concatenation
of countless time- or motion-saturated frames that forms the basis of
Deleuzian film language. Also, needless to say, there’s very little point
in deconstructing this unreal presentation of historical figures in real
time, because even the most simple-minded viewer has no trouble
understanding that it’s a one-time stunt – an artificial, aesthetic de-
vice. Russian Ark isn’t trying to convince us with cognitive arguments;
it’s trying to make us believe by confronting us with a temporal per-
formance that we have no way of avoiding – short of not going to see
the movie at all.
A less radical, but in principle similar use of time is offered by
American Beauty, which conveys the same basic device used in Russian
Ark using much more conventional cinematographic means. Thus the
bird’s-eye-view establishing shot of American Beauty, where Lester
Burnham introduces us to “my neighborhood…my street…my life,”
seems at first little more than a hoary Hollywood device. However, it
also marks Lester’s transtemporal, transcendent perspective that we
can only understand after we, like Lester, have left the everyday time
frame of the story line at the movie’s end. Besides providing us with a
frame favoring panchronological over everyday time, the movie also
encourages us, along with Lester and Ricky, to bracket and make pres-
ent certain objects embodying transcendence – most notably Angela
(in Lester’s slow-motion erotic visions) and the white plastic bag or
the dead bird (in Ricky’s real-time videos). This bracketing of chro-
nological time might at first seem to be nothing more than a famil-
iar cinematographic device. In performatist terms, though, it marks
the unity of static, framed time and the transcendent time in which
the deified Lester partakes – thus staking out a basic agreement be-
tween the outer and inner frame, between inner vision and super-
natural experience. Conversely, quotidian time in American Beauty is
framed in such a way that characters can transcend that time; the act
of transcendence in turn provides an emotional basis for identifying
with these characters. In Chapter Three, which treats performatist
cinema, I’ll go into more detail on the different ways that movies force
both characters and ourselves to experience transcendence as a quali-
tative shift in spatially demarcated, temporal “chunks.”
Summary
Since my introductory discussion of performatism has covered a

lot of ground, it seems helpful to close this chapter by summarizing
what I consider to be the four basic features of performatism.
1. The basic semiotic mode of performatism is monist. It requires
that things or thingness be integrated into the concept of sign. The
most useful monist concept of sign I have been able to find up to now
is Eric Gans’s notion of the ostensive. Ostensivity means that at least
two people, in order to defer violence in a situation of mimetic conflict,
intuitively agree on a present sign that marks, deifies, and beautifies its
own violence-deferring performance. This originary ostensive scene,
in which the human, language, religion and aesthetics are all made
present at once for the first time, is hypothetical. My own, specifi-
cally historical interpretation of the ostensive is that it embodies the
semiotic mechanism generating the new epoch better than any other
competing monist concept. The ostensive, in other words, marks the
becoming-conscious of the new epoch. Accordingly, the job of a per-
formatist aesthetics would be to describe the different manifestations
of ostensivity in contemporary works of art and show how they make
these works appeal to us in terms of monist, no longer postmodern
mindsets. This book is devoted to realizing that project.
2. The aesthetic device specific to performatism is double framing.
The double frame is based on a lock or fit between an outer frame (the
work construct itself) and an inner one (an ostensive scene or scenes
of some kind). The work is constructed in such a way that its main
argumentative premise shifts back and forth between these two ven-
ues; the logic of one augments the other in a circular, closed way. The
result is a performative tautology that allows the endless circulation
of cognitively dubious, but formally irrefutable metaphysical figures
within its boundaries. These metaphysical figures are in turn valid
only within the frame of a particular work; their patent constructed-
ness reinforces the set-apartness or givenness of the work itself and
coercively establishes its status as aesthetic – as a realm of objective,
privileged, and positive experience. Because they are easy to identify
and debunk, these metaphysical figures force readers or viewers to
make a choice between the untrue beauty of the closed work or the
open, banal truth of its endless contextualization. Performatist works
of art attempt to make viewers or readers believe rather than convince
them with cognitive arguments. This, in turn, may enable them to
assume moral or ideological positions that they otherwise would not
have. In terms of reader reception, a performance is successful when a
reader’s belief pattern is changed in some particular way, and when he
or she begins to project that new belief pattern back onto reality.
3. The human locus of performatism is the opaque or dense subject.
Because the simplest formal requirement of once more becoming a
whole subject is tautological – to be a subject the subject must some-
how set itself off from its context – performative characters consoli-
date their position by appearing opaque or dense to the world around
them. This opacity is in itself not desirable per se, but rather forms the
starting point for possible further development. This development is
best measured in terms of whether (or to what degree) a subject tran-
scends the double frame in which it happens to find itself. In narrative
genres, this ability of a human subject to transcend a frame is the
benchmark of an event or successful performance. In psychological
narrative this transcendence is necessarily partial; in fantastic narra-
tive it may be achieved totally. In architectonic and pictorial genres,
which are by nature static, we encounter paradoxical states of satura-
tion58 or impendency59 that impose the conditions for transcendence
on us without actually demonstrating how that transcendence is even-
tually consummated.
4. The spatial and temporal coordinates of performatism are cast

in a theist mode. This means that time and space are framed in such
a way that subjects have a real chance to orient themselves within
them and transcend them in some way. Because of its obvious con-
structedness and artificiality, this set-up or frame causes us to assume
the existence of an implicit author forcing his or her will upon us as
a kind of paradox or conundrum whose real meaning is beyond our
ken. In terms of plot, we find a basic conflict between the spatial and
temporal coerciveness of the theist frame and the human or figural
subjects struggling to overcome it. In terms of spatial representation
(in architecture), we find a basic tension between the architect’s at-
tempt to effect transcendence and the physical limitations imposed by
the material he or she is using; the expansive theist gesture is always
accompanied by a human, limited one.
Chapter 2
Performatism in Literature
The performatist turn in literature has been gradual and unmarked

by spectacular quarrels, manifestoes, or stylistic experimentation.
None of the literary works that I have up to now identified as perfor-
matist shows striking formal innovation, and none of the authors has
come forth with dramatic public counterproposals to postmodern-
ism. Rather, performatism in literature has worked tacitly, by taking
crucial devices of postmodernist aesthetics and retooling them in a
way that is no longer compatible with prevailing postmodern norms.
In literature this can be most readily seen in strategies that produce
narrative closure in double frames and ensure obligatory reader identi-
fication with the subjects entrapped in those frames – devices that are
at loggerheads with prevailing postmodern notions of how texts work.
These changes have not been lost on critics. However, those of them
who do identify these strategies are usually content to dismiss them
as variants of already known patterns or explain them away as yet
another hard-to-follow twist of postmodern irony. The real problem
is not that critics are unaware of the new devices; the problem is that
they are unable to conceive of them as having a dominant, unifying
role in the texts at hand, and they are unable to place them in the
perspective of a larger epochal shift. The result has been a massive loss
of sensibility for the ethical, political and aesthetic concerns of these
new works, whose focus lies in creating a particular posture of belief
in a closed aesthetic frame rather than generating yet another cycle of
open-ended ironic reflection.
To show how the new performatist devices work in literature I have
drawn on seven popular, critically acclaimed texts offering a broad
spectrum of styles, themes and ideological standpoints. I will begin
by discussing a performatist text from Poland that has a direct dop-
pelganger in the world of English postmodernism. Although using
exactly the same gimmick – a fancy international hotel as a allegory of

global capitalism – Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “The Hotel Capi-
tal” arrives at completely different results than does Ali Smith in her
stereotypically postmodern novel Hotel World. More familiar to Wes-
tern readers will be Yann Martel’s popular, Man-Booker prize win-
ning novel Life of Pi. What at first glance seems to be an ironic send-
up of a naive religious believer turns out to confirm the act of belief
more than to refute it. With the next example, a chapter from Ingo
Schulze’s novel Simple Stories, I’ll show how an author develops a per-
formatist plot resolution out of a specifically postmodern intertextual
source, in this case Raymond Carver’s short story “Sacks.” To avoid a
completely eurocentric bias I have also chosen Arundhati Roy’s inter-
national bestseller The God of Small Things. Roy’s novel demonstrates
how a performatist, no longer postmodern concept of unified beauty
can be put in the service of radical political resistance and the search
for cultural and personal identity. To include a historical perspective,
I will discuss Bernhard Schlink’s internationally acclaimed novel The
Reader, which treats the aftermath of the Holocaust in a way no lon-
ger compatible with the postmodernist victimary mode. And finally,
using Miloš Urban’s novel Sevenchurch, I’ll briefly outline how a sub-
lime, “terrorist” critique of capitalism works in the context of Eastern
European culture.
Checking out of the Epoch: Hotel World vs. “The Hotel Capital”
Hotel World
On the surface, Ali Smith’s Hotel World1 is concerned with the

accidental death of a young hotel worker named Sara Wilby, whose
name (Wilby – “will be”) is already resonant with deferred poten-
tial. Sara, who has just taken on a job as chambermaid in the chain
Global Hotels, bets a co-worker that she can stuff herself into the
hotel’s dumbwaiter. Immediately after she performs this feat, however,
the elevator cable tears, sending her crashing to death at the bottom
of the shaft.
The fatal occurrence and its consequences are recounted in six
stylistically very different narrative sections. Although in the novel
Performatism in Literature 41
five striking individuals dominate each section – they are, in order

of appearance, the victim herself, the hotel’s receptionist, a homeless
woman, a female journalist, and Sara’s sister – our identification with
these figures is constantly being disturbed, undermined, or sabotaged
entirely. Thus, in her narration, the dead accident victim appears as
a ghost who visits first its family, then its own body in the grave. So
that no one might get the idea of taking the heroine’s existence in the
hereafter all too seriously, the ghost occasionally emits a “o-oo-oo”
sound – just like in the comics.
This ironic treatment of characters’ discourse applies no less to the
living. The reader’s identification with the younger sister’s anger and
grief is undermined by the complete lack of punctuation marks in the
chapter narrated by her. Her intensively experienced emotional reac-
tion is overwritten, as it were, by a kind of discursive dysfunctionality
whose only source can be that of the author (since no teenager, no
matter how grief-stricken, would leave out every last single punctua-
tion mark in her own writing). The suffering of the homeless, tuber-
cular Else is similarly marked by defective language: when begging
her speech is reduced to almost incomprehensible fragments like “Spr
sm chn” (“spare some change”).
These and other plays with script and language show the author
to be an proficient, remote administrator of that dysfunctionality and
defectiveness which other wise weighs heavily upon her characters.
By contrast, the only figure in the novel who is able to write, speak,
and act in a conventional way is mercilessly exposed as a fraud. The
person in question is a female journalist who befriends the homeless,
disoriented Else while staying at the hotel for a night. The character,
aptly named Penny, quickly proves herself to be everything promised
by her name. Having written out a large check to Else, she has sec-
ond thoughts about it later in the night and has it cancelled – thus
neatly exposing her own magnanimity as an empty, vain projection.
The author doesn’t want her character (or us) to buy into a cheap
identification with Else; she wants to inscribe herself literally and di-
rectly in the dysfunctionality, alterity and suffering of her characters
– a contact that however never cleaves to one person for all too long.
Like the ghost, the bodiless, preternaturally weightless author moves
effortlessly through her own book, haunting now one, now the other
character.
By contrast, the author’s treatment of space and order is easy to
pin down ideologically. At times, in fact, the book reads as if the au-
thor had cribbed straight out of something by Judith Butler or Michel
Foucault. The hotel is a spatial trap, a panoptic surveillance center in
which the employees are strictly monitored and punished according to
need. Loopholes in this hegemonic matrix arise only by accident – as
when the omnipresent surveillance cameras fail to work shortly after
Sara’s accident. The characters in the novel, who are equipped with
a quasi natural, spontaneous ability to resist à la Judith Butler, put
these flubs to immediate use. Lise, the mentally disturbed reception-
ist, takes advantage of the camera failure to sneak homeless Else into
a luxury suite. Else, who is traumatized by enclosed spaces to begin
with – some Christian missionaries once tried to convert her inside a
locked room – soon flees, but forgets to turn off the bathwater, caus-
ing a small deluge. The damage is however quickly repaired and the
costs fobbed off on an innocent chambermaid.
As this turn of plot suggests, resistance is both pointless and use-
less. It can occur only in the involuntary playing out of one’s own
dysfunctionality but not as a goal-oriented, willful act. Instead, we
are encouraged to imagine the possibility of such resistance from a
higher, constantly shifting vantage point. The authorially mediated
metaperspective allows us to experience ironic schadenfreude over the
small flood caused by Else and Lise even as we realize its accidental,
inconsequential character.
In view of the close connection between space and power, Sara’s
accidental death in the innermost, “dumbest” and most confining
space of the hotels carries a certain ideological weight after all. Sara’s
death and the barely concealed spatial violence emanating from the
hotel form a contingency relationship suggesting that something like
this must not take place but very well can. Sara’s senseless, accidental,
death-by-wager – the embodiment of the aleatoric per se – exposes
the reified essence of the hotel as a whole: its omnipresent structural
violence asserts itself even in the case of pure chance. Later on, Sara’s
sister will smash a hole in the wall of the hastily bricked up shaft
and throw an alarm clock into it so that she may experience the time
span between Sara’s life and death on her own. By contrast, the hotel
tempts its visitors with a false temporality, a false experience of tran-
scendence: in the hotel’s brochure indeed promises that “a transcen-
dent time is waiting to be had by all.”2
That time is not transcendent, but instead depends on spatial re-
strictions and contractual obligations is demonstrated vividly in the
last part of the novel. Sara’s unrequited love for the salesgirl in a watch
repair shop is answered – but only belatedly and in a mode of perma-
nent deferral. The salesgirl, who had only fleetingly taken note of the
pining Sara and who knows nothing of her death, intuitively realizes
her affection ex post facto and – disregarding all regulations – puts
on the watch Sara had brought in for repair. Love, then, is possible
after all: you love without knowing the other, without wanting to do
so, and without having to invest your desire in a bothersome interper-
sonal projection. Although the salesgirl’s wearing of the wrist watch
marks a double reconciliation – it is a symbolic act both of loving
and of remembrance – this moment can ultimately only be enjoyed
from the cool, epistemologically remote vantage point of the authorial
metaposition – a position that undermines all lasting identifications
and does not stay attached to individual figures or positions for any
length of time.
At the very beginning of the novel the ghostly Sara begged the
reader to “time me” – to measure her time so that she doesn’t disap-
pear in différance, in the endlessly receding, arbitrary conditionality
of language. This “timing” – the translation of fluid temporality into
fixed spatiality – is achieved formally as soon as the salesgirl puts on
Sara’s wristwatch. Yet even this unwitting act of remembrance threat-
ens to go awry. On the book’s last page we find once more the lines
that the ghost, who is becoming ever more forgetful, uttered in the
book’s beginning chapter:
Remember you must live.

Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.3
This tossed salad of signifiers is followed by the ghost’s howl, which

ends and simultaneously opens the book. The voice of the ever fainter
growing Other forms the alpha and omega of the novel as a whole: the
hereafter appears as the mirror image of a dysfunctional here and now
rather than as a transcendent shore of salvation. Indeed, the ghost and
the author turn out to be effects of the same persistent mechanism
that holds forth the possibility of transcendence while in the final
analysis always allowing it to fall flat. In terms of reader response,
this mechanism is at the end passed on to the reader, who by way
of a semi-comprehensible half-insult (“remainder you mist leaf”) is
encouraged to take part, albeit belatedly, in an unending ring-around-
the-rosy of misdirected resistance and yearning.
As Hotel World graphically demonstrates, late postmodernism is
caught in a self-made trap. Whoever presents herself as epistemologi-
cally invulnerable falls into an empty, indeed ghostly game of hide-
and-seek with the reader and with herself; whoever foregoes this sort
of epistemological critique in favor of metaphysical ideals becomes a
purveyor of simple-minded, if not downright fraudulent projections.
Since there is no immanent way out of this endless loop-the-loop,
poststructuralist critics have long been in agreement that postmodern-
ism will never end; it will simply refine and multiply self-ironic strate-
gies for acknowledging belatedness and producing deferral. We are
fated, it would seem, to shuttle endlessly between the poles of meta-
physical wishful thinking and the merciless epistemological critique
of the very same.
“The Hotel Capital”
That things can be done entirely differently is demonstrated by

Olga Tokarczuk’s story “The Hotel Capital.”4 Using motifs very simi-
lar to Hotel World, Tokarczuk arrives at a specifically monist, no longer
postmodern perspective on the sign, space, and the world in general.
At first it could seem as if “Hotel Capital” is even more zealous
in its critique of capitalism than is Hotel World. In case anyone has
missed the transparent symbolism of its name, the hotel is described
in the very first line as being “only for the rich.”5 Like Sara Wilby, the
heroine and first-person narrator is a lowly chambermaid and, more-

over, a nameless foreigner. As in Hotel World, the Hotel Capital exerts
an omnipresent, deforming force on the main character. In fact, as
soon as the heroine puts on her uniform, she foregoes her own subjec-
tive sense of self: “I take off my exotic language, my strange name,
my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreci-
ated here, my memory of small events �...].”6 In keeping with the fatal
event related in Hotel World, the heroine is overcome by a feeling of
existential angst when riding the cramped service elevator to her work
– she is afraid “lest the lift should stop and I should stay here forever,
enclosed like a bacterium inside the body of the Hotel Capital.”7 Fi-
nally, we even encounter a small flood in one of the rooms which, as in
Hotel World, temporarily disrupts order in the hotel without washing
it away entirely.
The postmodern reader now expecting to be initiated into a subal-
tern victim’s chronicle of alienation and otherness will be sorely disap-
pointed. In spite of the superficial similarities with the ambience of
Hotel World, “Hotel Capital” proposes completely different semiotic
and spatial relations aimed at promoting unity, order, and belief. In
particular, space appears as the guarantor of a whole, intimate, indeed
sacral ambience which can be experienced only within the confines of
the otherwise worldly hotel.
This spatially determined sacral experience can be thought of
as a sphere in the sense used by Peter Sloterdijk.8 Sloterdijk calls the
sphere an “aspirated commune,”9 a protected interior space that al-
lows intimacy, sensuality, and social cohesiveness to develop at all in
the first place. As historians of religion like Mircea Eliade confirm,
this interior experience is a primal one. Accordingly, the creation of
closed, centered spaces must be viewed not as a metaphysical ploy
but as an attempt to make space livable to begin with: “If the world
is to be lived in, it must be founded – and no world can come to birth
in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space.”10
According to Eliade, this is “not a matter of theoretical speculation,
but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on
the world.”11 Because it is essential to founding life the primal space
is always placed in the middle of the world and displays a vertical,
hierarchical structure that literally and figuratively opens up to the

transcendent world of the gods.12
Now, the claim that there once existed an originary, pre-reflex-
ive, hierarchically arranged space with a built-in escape hatch to the
heavens doesn’t present much of a challenge for a poststructuralist
or postmodern appropriation. Inasmuch as this kind of pre-reflexive,
originary world is anchored in discourse it can always be conceived of
as arising from a double, irreducible act of inclusion and exclusion. In
such a situation a poststructuralist would quite properly insist on giv-
ing the excluded and chaotic outer world its just due. And, he or she
would insist that an originary space can only be experienced again by
way of simulation, which is to say in a belated act that simultaneously
undermines and outdoes the original.
This act of appropriation will only encounter serious resistance
when the sense of spatial intimacy is put on as a performance with
aesthetic means. In such a case the text will be presented as a closed
space, which, by exerting one-sided pressure on the observer, gives
him or her an unambiguous choice between an inside (going along
with the work) or an outside (going against the work). This kind of
performatist work is not mere discourse or simulation, but rather impos-
es the closed conditions of the sacral, originary space onto the observer with
aesthetic means. What we have here, then, is the fusion of a privileged
aesthetic space in the Kantian sense using rather un-Kantian means
that you might describe as ritualistic, dogmatic or compulsive.13
It goes without saying that this forced aesthetic experience does
not suspend the possibility of critical reflection. No one today can
actually return to a sacral or ritual experience of interiority, no one can
(or wants to) completely shut out the vibrant hurly-burly of exterior
space. The possibility of deceit and of fraud thus still lingers in every
performative act of framing – but precisely as a possibility, and not
as a preordained, epistemologically guaranteed result as in postmod-
ernism. Readers, in other words, now have a real choice. If this kind
of aesthetically mediated inner space remains more or less intact we
will be dealing with a performatist monism; if it mixes uncontrollably
with exterior space we will fall back into the endlessly undecidable
convolutions of postmodernism.
But let us return to “Hotel Capital.” If the space of the hotel is a

sphere in Sloterdijk’s sense, then it is by no means an idyllic refuge.
The sacrally aspirated hotel room – no less so than in Hotel World
– is unavoidably exposed to the pressures exerted by globalization and
global capitalism. As the narrator herself remarks, the room is a “four-
cornered, prostituted space”14 that gives itself to anyone who is willing
to pay for it. The space of the hotel, whose sacral, protective function
is constantly being emphasized by the narrator, is in the secularized
world itself helpless and exposed. Space requires an agent who would,
as it were, clean up the spiritual and metaphysical mess brought into it
by the hotel’s guests. Precisely this active, theist role is filled out by the
narrator/chambermaid, who intervenes in a life-affirming way in the
half-public, half-intimate sphere of the guests. Having temporarily laid
aside her subjective personality, she settles into the invisible realm that
is neither outside nor in and intervenes from there in interior space – a
transcendental subject with a theist mission and a human face.
The postmodern reader secretly hoping for the first-person narra-
tor to be ironically dismantled in the course of the story will wait in
vain. Indeed, in narratological terms much the opposite takes place:
the first-person narrator acquires distinctly authorial characteristics.
In lieu of direct antagonists – as a rule the heroine tidies up in empty
rooms – the story appears as a series of quasi-philosophical medita-
tions on space and the people in it; in lieu of disruptive hints from
the author we are forced to identify with the heroine and her space-
friendly value judgments. From the normative postmodern point of
view it is of course always possible to reject this authorially supported
mindset as blind self-deception. If you do so, though, you will stum-
ble into a narrative trap. For either you enter into the closed space of
the work or you remain outside it. The work frame changes from a
place of undecidability to a place of decision – quite contrary to the
normative precepts of postmodernism. The act of reading reproduces
the simultaneously coercive and comforting quality of the fictive in-
ner space.
This experience of spatially mediated pleasure (Kant’s Wohlgefallen)
must be understood performatively, and not discursively or conceptu-
ally. Although we may be in disagreement with individual meanings
or arguments in the work, we must nonetheless accept it as a whole.

The reader is suspended – half voluntarily, half by way of force – in an
aesthetically mediated no-man’s land which can only be conceived of
or experienced under the given conditions of the aesthetic frame. This
spatially determined pleasure is accompanied in turn by a practically
idiot-proof, compulsory mechanism that arrests the restless, hyper-
critical spirit of the postmodern reader long enough until she is able
to identify with what is going on in the work’s interior space. If the
obstinate reader balks at this, then she will remain where she belongs:
namely on the outside. Thus once more – with a little dogmatic help
– we arrive at the restoration of what Kant calls necessary aesthetic
pleasure �notwendiges Wohlgefallen].15
In the case of “Hotel Capital,” the coercive frame manifests itself
in the sacralization and aesthetization of what at first seems to be
purely practical terms of employment. When starting work the hero-
ine puts on a quasi-sacral uni-form which cloaks a conciliatory, spa-
tially limited monist mindset; as soon as she takes off her work clothes
she returns to a personal, “interested” attitude commensurate with
the needs of daily life. The heroine’s space-friendly attitude is based
on a simple contractual agreement: it is not an authentic, natural, or
originary state.
The Hotel Capital itself offers a spatially defined metaphysical or-
der that travelers take advantage of in different ways. The metaphysi-
cal ideal of the hotel room is approached most closely by a Japanese
husband and wife who leave behind practically no traces – those indis-
pensable poststructuralist bearers of alterity. Their room, remarks the
narrator, “gives the impression of not being occupied at all.”16 There
are no objects left laying around by mistake, no personal traces, not
even an odor. And, when the chambermaid cleans up she “create�s]
more disorder than they would make in a month.”17 The only com-
munication between the order-loving Japanese and the order-uphold-
ing chambermaid takes place through the tip that the couple leaves
behind in a neat stack on their pillow. The coins, however, are not for
the chambermaid but for the room itself, for “�…] its silent continu-
ance in the world, for its constancy amid the inexplicable inconstancy
�...].”18 The economy of this gift is transcendental and self-confirming:
it represents the sacral opposite of the “prostituted” room and makes

the room seem like a “small temple.”19 On the other hand, though, the
relationship as a whole remains impersonal and cool. The chamber-
maid is familiar only with “the immaterial shape of the footprints left
in the abandoned sandals”;20 conversely, for the Japanese guests she re-
mains without a body and face. Communication and value exchange
don’t take place through tattered words or marks (“spr sm chn”) but
through shared attitudes toward space and the objects in it. The scene
with the tip simply acknowledges the latent dualism of this dialectical
relationship. The more spiritual and complete the relationship to the
absent guests, the more the relationship of the individual to material
reality is placed in doubt.
The opposite of the Japanese are the “young Americans,” the bear-
ers of imperial disorder. This disorder has no true metaphysical va-
lence of its own but is rather a “thoughtless, stupid mess” (literally
bałagan – a kind of Slavic Punch and Judy show) in which “there
is no rhyme or reason.”21 This lack of order – with greetings from
Baudrillard – is circulated by the media and intensified ad infinitum.
The absent young Americans leave their TV on to CNN, and CNN
assures the chambermaid that the world exists and is full of young
Americans. The imperial arrogance of the young Americans and their
“inattentiveness to the present”22 is countered by the chambermaid’s
apprehension of their common corporeal mortality: “I clean around
roughly, as if afraid of destroying these relics of the transitoriness of
the people who live here.”23 This isn’t ironic schadenfreude but rather
existential insight into a shared fear of death – a fear that the cham-
bermaid in this case doesn’t want to assuage entirely. Later, in the
room of the dying old Swede whose body absorbs all odors from with-
out, the chambermaid will deliberately leave behind a sweaty, vital
whiff of her own self. In a way that is “conspiratorial, respiratory and
inspirational,”24 as Sloterdijk suggests, the chambermaid tries to forge
a “dyadic union”25 in interior space that will set both human frailty
and human arrogance to rights.
The chambermaid’s job differs, however, from Sloterdijk’s in one
important respect. Whereas Sloterdijk is trying to reconstruct histori-
cally the “morpho-immunological” spheres26 and “foams”27 that he
considers indispensable for the development of human culture per se,

the chambermaid faces a much more immediate problem. Her task is
namely to restore a state of interior intimacy within the “prostituted”
ambience of the Hotel Capital. And that is why the chambermaid
proceeds in such a deliberate way, so to speak in accordance with an
authorially approved metaphysical work code.28 If you want to clean
up after postmodernism (or even sweep it away entirely) then you
must, as the heroine says, do so with deliberation: you must first frame
scattered traces of alienation so that modest inspirational measures
can at all take hold.
Given the rigid spatial order of “Hotel Capital,” it is justified to
pose the question of theodicy, which is to say the question of evil and
the responsibility that spiritualized space bears for it. (In Hotel World
the answer is clear: the spatial order is the sufficient, but not necessary
condition of evil.) True to the tradition of metaphysical optimism in
which Tokarczuk’s story follows, evil doesn’t appear as a principle sui
generis but rather as disorder or as a falling away from spirituality.
The first kind of disorder – that of the “young Americans” – is
childish. It corresponds to a lack of consciousness and humility in
regard to the world that the young Americans dominate. The second
kind of disorder, by contrast, is spatial: it resides in the vast expansive-
ness of the hotel (and, by extension, the world as a whole). The hotel
has a mysterious tract called the “squar” which is designed for long-
term guests and has a confusing layout; it is labyrinthine, convoluted,
spiraled and dark: “Something strange happens to space here. Space
does not like spiral stairs, chimneys and wells. It tends to degenerate
into labyrinths.”29 The tangled, invaginated layout of the hotel build-
ing appears as a flaw offending against the anthropomorphic space’s
supposedly natural love of order. It’s easy enough to deconstruct this
simple personification of space, but it’s harder to ignore it within the
framework of the story itself – unless, of course, you yourself are in-
tent on spreading disorder as a matter of principle.
The third variant of disorder is no less anthropomorphic than the
others. Its point of departure is a self-willed, mischievous room bear-
ing the number 229; its “Kabbalistic sum” is said to equal the number
thirteen, which “is a number of excess and trickery.”30 This room has
an appropriately subversive effect on visitors: “I suspect that one night

here is enough to get them trapped, to bring unquiet dreams, to hold
them a little longer, to bring out desires and overturn carefully laid
plans.”31 The minor inundation mentioned earlier also had its origin
in this room, which induces an intensified sense of corporeality and
narcissistic self-alienation in the chambermaid: “The room encloses
me within itself, cradles me. It is a most tender if non-physical caress,
this embrace which only a closed space can give you.”32 And:
I feel distinctly that my body exists. �...] I am aware of my skin,

conscious that it’s alive and breathing, that it has its own scent,
and I can feel my hair where it touches my ears. I like then to
get up and look at myself in the mirror which never spares me
a surprise. Is this me? Really me?33
Were the narrator not being caressed by the room around her, one
could suppose that Lacan and his mirror stage were lurking some-
where in the wings. For the corporeal and narcissistic feeling of inse-
curity experienced by the chambermaid is further intensified by the
gaze of a guest that severs the chambermaid’s metaphysical bond with
the space around her. Thus “the established �literally: eternal] order
is inverted. My cleaning is no longer omnipotent, it becomes emptied
of meaning.”34
It could at first seem that the presence of the unashamedly gazing
guest shatters the Apollonian dreamspace of the chambermaid and re-
vives precisely that patriarchic order which in Hotel World could only
be overcome temporarily by accident and through deceit. Yet here, too,
space and the metaphysical service code offer a way out. As soon as
the chambermaid leaves the room she is able to recuperate in that very
depth of space which was the death of Sara Wilby: “I �...] stop in front
of the banister separating a stairwell two or three stories high. I look
down and see only the ground floor from here. And – as usual – not a
soul about. �...] This is the best relaxation: to look down to where every-
thing becomes progressively smaller and more distant, less clear, more
illusory.”35 The spatial haven of the theist perspective has been restored
– but with a built-in personal or human dimension of self-deception.
If the solidarity among subalterns in Hotel World is characterized

by a fleeting, Nietzschean love for pure strangers, then in “Hotel Cap-
ital” it reveals itself to be genetic, object-oriented, and monist. The
justification for this is provided by the Castilian laundryman Pedro,
who resembles a bearded missionary and who draws on an originary
history of language and etymology to make his point. According to
Pedro, when people “in times of old” were wandering across Europe
and Asia they carried their languages with them “like banners. They
formed great families, although they did not know each other; only
the words were permanent.”36 Pedro, says the narrator, “pulls out the
roots from words as if stoning cherries,” and those listening to his lec-
ture slowly realize that they all “spoke the same language long ago.”37
Although this doesn’t quite apply to everyone – the narrator is (unjus-
tifiably) afraid to ask about her own Polish language, and a woman
from Nigeria “pretends not to understand,” everyone wants to take
cover under the “dark swirling cloud of prehistory”38 that Pedro un-
furls over their heads. This emblematic, genetic concept of language
has a direct counterpart in the Swedish Bible that the narrator finds in
the room of the dying Swede:
I cannot understand anything and yet all seems so familiar. A

red bookmark marks the Book of Ecclesiastes. I run my eye
along the page and I have the impression that I am beginning
to understand it. First individual words and then whole phrases
float out of memory and mix with the print. “That which hath
been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God
requires that which is past.”39
The foreign words act as small hollow enclosures into which human
memory breathes spiritual life; through her ritually mediated reading
the narrator experiences the possibility of an originary, linguistic and
sacral unity in the sense of Mircea Eliade’s illud tempus. In Eric Gans’s
terminology, this understanding of language is specifically ostensive.
This reading is neither a hermeneutic exegesis nor an act of inscribing
oneself in an already always existing network of signs. Rather, it is a
ritual making-present of a prehistorical moment in which the sign is
experienced as object-related, but also as conflict-resolving and divine:

as a performance.
Pi’s Believe It or Not
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi40 presents us with a curious case. We are

introduced to a hero who was the sole survivor of a serious accident
and had to fight for his life afterwards under adverse conditions. The
hero describes his ordeal at great length to two claims adjusters re-
sponsible for checking its veracity. At first, his brave, uplifting story
seems consistent and true. At the end, however, a host of clues make
clear that parts of the tale must either be a fantasy or lie. There is no
doubt that certain details contradict well-founded scientific assump-
tions about our natural world. After the hero has finished, the claims
adjusters point out these discrepancies. The hero denies that he is ly-
ing but says he will offer a second story. This one is short, brutal, and
to the point. It repeats the basic content of the first story, but in a way
not contradicting science and all known evidence. When asked about
the discrepancy between the two stories, the hero answers by saying
essentially this: “I am the sole witness to an accident in which I have
lost everything dear to me. I have two stories that tell about it. One is
beautiful and one is ugly. You have no way of knowing for sure which
one is true. Which story would you prefer?” In the end, the claims ad-
juster’s report on the case is inconclusive. Based on the facts at hand,
he says, he cannot determine how the accident happened. In wrapping
up his report, however, he chooses to cite a detail from the hero’s first,
false story rather than the second, more plausible one.
It’s instructive to see how this stripped-down tale corresponds
to narrative strategies usually associated with postmodernism. As in
many postmodernist narratives, it first causes us to identify with a
central character and then abruptly undercuts the terms of that iden-
tification. One thing about it, however, is odd. Rather than leaving us
in an attitude of skeptical undecidability regarding the hero, as post-
modernist texts tend to do, it encourages us to revise our skepticism
and identify with his story even though we know it to be false. Our
response is evidently supposed to follow that of the claims adjuster,
who, though unable to reach a final conclusion regarding the facts, de-
cides to cite the beautiful, untrue story. And, if we flesh out the story
with more detail, things get odder still. For the hero is not just a wit-
ness to a tragic accident, but also an ardent practitioner of Hinduism,
Christianity, and Islam (in later years he also studies the Cabbala to
boot). When confronted with the contradiction involved in this kind
of multiple allegiance, he says simply, “I just want to love God.”41 The
point of the book is evidently to make us identify with and believe in
a hero who wants to worship a central, unified deity at all costs.
As my summary suggests, this popular and critically acclaimed
book presents something of a logical challenge to postmodernism.
Where postmodernism revels in skepticism, Life of Pi encourages be-
lief; where postmodernism offers competing, equally plausible worlds,
Life of Pi gives us a choice between what is false and what is most likely
true; and where postmodernism favors decentered, deceptive states of
knowing, Life of Pi focuses on unity, willpower, and love. While it’s
certainly possible to deconstruct the latter position, it really isn’t much
of a challenge to do so. The book itself makes clear that Pi’s belief is
based on willful self-deceit, and it makes sure that knowledge of the
true facts behind the accident will remain deferred forever. From a
critical postmodern or poststructuralist point of view, the book seems
to be pointless or trite. Why, after all, write a book making us identi-
fy with a metaphysical attitude that we know is demonstrably false to
begin with?
As I have suggested above, this sort of sensibility is not accessible
to the set of critical practices associated with poststructuralism. The
problem is not so much that Life of Pi resolutely resists deconstruction;
it’s that Pi deconstructs its own metaphysical conceit so completely
that there is hardly anything left for the canny poststructuralist reader
to do. This happens because Life of Pi shifts the framework of its
argumentation from an epistemological plane to an aesthetic one. The
book says, in effect: “given that we can never know for sure what is
true, isn’t it better to enjoy what is beautiful, good and uplifting rather
than dwell on what is ugly, evil and disillusioning?” The book does
not however just pose this question as an abstract postulate. Instead,
it forces it on us in terms of a concrete choice: we are given a long,
beautiful story and a short, brutish one and asked to decide for one or
the other. And this choice, of course, is part of a larger aesthetic set-up
or trap. Readers opting for the more plausible, ugly tale will tire of it
quickly and let the whole thing drop. Readers choosing the beautiful,
untrue tale, by contrast, will continue to reflect on it while treating
its precepts as something that might be true. This type of novel elicits
a specific, aesthetically mediated performance from readers by forcing
them to believe in a character or event within the frame of the fic-
tional text. Indulging in this doubled suspension of belief might at
first seem incautious or naive. However, it is a necessary precondition
for all future acts of interpretation, which in themselves may be ironic,
intricate and subtle.
At the core of Pi is an inner frame, which is in this case is pre-
sented in the form of an originary scene. This scene, by reducing
human experience to a few simple givens, seems to bring us closer
to the very beginnings of humanness itself. In the case of Pi, the
originary scene is, of course, the lifeboat that he shares with a Bengal
tiger (or a murderous cook, depending on how you look at it). Please
note that these originary scenes are in no way authentic; they are
neither entirely natural nor are they prior to semiosis. Rather, they
expose characters to a radical, restrictive presence which they must
transcend in some way (Pi, for example, must overcome the presence
of the hungry tiger).
Within the text, the originary scene or inner frame causes readers
to identify in a certain set way with a character who is locked into a
situation at the center of our attention. Because of their radical fenc-
ing-in of presence, originary scenes tend to be marked by the use of
what Eric Gans calls ostensive signs.42 These are simple, name-like
signs that are used to designate present objects or states; in Gans’s
version of the originary scene the first ostensive sign creates belief and
beauty by wondrously deferring mimetic violence.43 In this particular
instance, the ostensive sign is a whistle sound that Pi uses to train the
tiger not to attack him (the whistle is made to stand for the rocking of
the boat, which makes the tiger seasick). In general, there has to be a
lock or fit between the inner frame and the text whole or outer frame
for the performatist plot to work.
In the case of Pi, the immanent, ostensively mediated act of train-

ing the tiger (the inner frame) allows Pi not just to survive, but also to
confirm his love of a transcendent God – the beautiful story which,
taken as a whole, we have almost no choice but to believe (the outer
frame). If, on the other hand, we accept the validity of a sober, disil-
lusioned interpretation (the more plausible story about the cook), it
would destroy the fit between the frames and lead to a deconstructive,
though not very satisfying, reading of the text as a whole. Once more,
though, the choices we have here are very limited. This is not least be-
cause the ostensive way Pi that trains the tiger – by confronting him
with something sickening every time he tries to attack – is transferred
directly to the terms of reader response. The skeptic “attack ing” the
belief structure of the book gets an ugly story, the believer accept-
ing it a beautiful one. Our doubts about believing something that is
beautiful but probably not true are never eliminated; however, this
self-doubt is now enclosed within the structure of belief itself.
Although there is still a considerable irony involved in the way
we are made to believe Pi’s story, this irony doesn’t vitiate the way
we identify with him and his tale.44 The ultimate frame of reference
is performative, and not epistemological: it applies only within the
confines of the particular text at hand. The point of the text is not
to have us grasp a trace of truth by relating something in the text to
something outside of it, but rather to make us believe and experience
beauty within its own closed space. This is the common goal of all
performatist fiction: it forces us, at least for the time being, to take
the beautiful attitude of a believer rather than the skeptical attitude
of a continually frustrated seeker of truth.45 Hence our willingness to
believe in Pi’s way of believing in God applies only within the peculiar
world of the text. Outside its boundaries we can go back to being our
old secular, skeptical selves again – if we so choose. The act of reading,
however, has been turned toward an aesthetically mediated, closed act
of believing rather than one of open-ended knowing.46
The kind of framing or forced identification described above
doesn’t rule out intertextual citations or critical reflection. These ex-
ternal factors must, however, always be subordinated to the unbend-
ing outer frame of the text. The frame, in other words, fences the text
off from the truth conditions of discourse in general – that endlessly

shifting, infinitely open realm in which seemingly singular, unequi-
vocal arguments can always turn into their exact opposites.47 While
it may indeed be possible to be very skeptical about certain aspects
of what is going on in the story, we nonetheless accept it because we
have been made to find it beautiful. This makes the aesthetic mode
– something that has traditionally always been roped off from the
conditions of practical everyday judgment – the privileged place of
argumentation. The difference between this performatist type of aes-
thetic and the traditional Kantian one is, however, that this one works
by coercion. Instead of adhering to formal, presumably transcendental
attributes of beauty, the text forces us to decide for beauty in terms of
a relative, very narrowly defined scene or frame. Performatist aesthet-
ics are “Kant with a club”: they bring back beauty, good, wholeness,
and a whole slew of other metaphysical propositions, but only under
very special, singular conditions that a text forces us to accept on its
own terms.48
The ironies and tensions growing out of this quid pro quo are
incidentally more than enough to keep performatist reader responses
alive and kick ing. Readers are always well aware that their not-quite
voluntary experiencing of beauty is part of a trade-off, and indeed one
of the main aims of performatist literature is to encourage reflection
on just what this trade-off entails. As the name “Pi” itself suggests,
the problems raised by the hero’s story are not reducible to a whole,
finite answer. Indeed, the initially closed-off text raises a whole bundle
of theological, ethical, and ideological issues whose discussion would
exceed the scope of this essay. The point is not that Life of Pi resists
being drawn into broader, uncontrollable contexts; it’s that the book
enters into those contexts under its own terms and in a different way
than was the case in postmodernism. Most notably, Life of Pi demands
(and in a certain sense creates) a new type of reader who is willing
to enter into the closed frame of the text and, at least for the time
being, identify with its artificially rigged center before going off on
his or her own. It would be going to far to say that performatist texts
like this restore subjectivity in the grand style that humanist critics
of postmodernism have always been longing for. However, they do
provide readers with a limited experience of identity-building under

controlled, rather coercive conditions.
Sad Sacks vs. Smiles: Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories
One way of highlighting the difference between performatism and

postmodernism is to take up a clear-cut case of intertextuality, which
is to say one in which a narrative text deliberately cites – and modifies
– a postmodern one in a way that runs counter to postmodern norms.
Because in the logic of postmodernism any attempt to break out of its
force field is already implicated in that field from the very beginning
as a trace or quote, an explicit case of intertextuality should be a good
litmus test of whether postmodernism can be cited and simultaneous-
ly turned in a direction that can’t be assimilated to postmodernism’s
own self-fulfilling prophecies about how texts work.
An excellent example of this kind of intertextual turn is the chap-
ter “Lächeln” (“Smiles”) from Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories,49 which
transplants the plot of Raymond Carver’s short story “Sacks”50 from
Sacramento to Munich, Germany. In both stories, a son meets a father
who has broken with his family some time before; the father makes
an elaborate confession to the son detailing why he left, and he gives
the son a trivial gift – in Carver’s story a sack of candy (which the
son forgets to take with him) and in Schulze’s a pair of handmade
potholders.
Carver is sometimes considered no longer postmodern because of
his “dirty realism” with its seedy milieus and lower-middle-class cha-
racters. However, many of his stories still use the basic postmodern
strategy of first fostering, and then undermining, reader identification
with central figures.51 These shifts in sympathy are in turn a direct
outgrowth of his characters’ radical dualism. The folksy, engaging cha-
racteristics we observe superficially or hear in his characters’ familiar
Middle American diction form a kind of outer shell which ef fectively
obscures the powerful, sinister forces roiling within them. Hence
when evil, or brutality, or some strong emotion breaks out of Car ver’s
characters, it often seems to have no immediate cause (a good example
of this is the story “Tell the Women We’re Going” in the collection
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). Inasmuch as they

resort to violence, Carver’s protagonists seem more like alien monsters
than like the K-Mart patrons they out wardly resemble. If we identify
with them at all, it’s because we enjoy the sublime thrill of uncovering
some malevolent force lurking beneath the banality of lower middle-
class American existence.52
In the case of “Sacks,” the father’s story, which is presumably meant
to foster understanding in his son, reveals only the man’s thoroughgo-
ing lasciviousness. His confession in fact resembles a traveling-sales-
man joke, with the father and his mistress being caught in bed by the
cuckolded husband and the father jumping half-naked through the
front window. Although in the process he seems to have experienced
some sort of epiphany, as often happens in Carver, we never find out
exactly what it is: the story breaks off before we learn how it affected
the teller.53 Similarly, the father’s gifts – jellybeans and luscious choco-
lates – are hardly more than tokens of his own petty lustfulness. The
son – aptly named Les – comes away from this reunion diminished
rather than enhanced. A traveling salesman himself, his own marriage
is also on the rocks, for reasons he doesn’t choose to mention. At the
beginning, though, Les says he “wants to pass along”54 his father’s
story to us – a story that turns out to be as empty and stale as a bad
joke. In the end, the son does exactly to us what his father has done
to him: he leaves us with his own story, which is no less desolate than
that of his father’s.
Having been thrust into the role of the narrator’s ersatz sons, we as
readers might expect some sort of positive identification to arise from
this. Yet our relationship with Les remains uncannily empty: we get
even less out of his own story than he got out of his father’s, just as
we are haunted by our inability to get a handle on exactly what he is
talking about. In spite of its “realism,” Car ver’s story works more on
an epistemological level than a semantic one. Signifiers aren’t there
to transmit inner meaning from a storyteller to someone else; they
simply pass their intrinsic emptiness on down the line. And what’s
even worse: we can’t get rid of them once we’ve got them, just as Les
can’t “forget” the sack of candy he has left behind at the airport bar.
Communication appears not just as a process of endless deferral and
endless diminution of meaning, but also as the accumulation of this

emptiness in involuntary acts of recollection and narration – some-
thing well in keeping with the epistemological skepticism and meta-
physical pessimism peculiar to postmodernism.
At first, Schulze’s father-son reunion in Simple Stories seems to
repeat Carver’s fictional setup under even less auspicious conditions.
The father left his family not two, but twenty-four years ago; the son
isn’t just having marital problems, but lost his wife in a traffic accident
and has never recovered from it emotionally. To compound things
there is also a typically German East-West divide. The father left his
family to defect to the West, where he remarried and became a success-
ful doctor. His contact with his son has been limited and condescend-
ing: first a card with a 100 mark bill congratulating him on the birth
of his son, then a condolence card, also with a 100 mark bill, upon the
death of his wife. The son, by contrast, is one of the losers in German
reunification. A former student of art history, he was thrown of out
the university and is now reduced to doing odd jobs – among other
things, he works as a traveling salesman (as recounted in Chapter 4,
“Panic”). The son isn’t even too sure about why he wanted to look up
his long-lost father in the first place. Maybe he was curious, he says,
maybe he was expecting to get some money.55
At first glance, his father’s story hardly seems designed to bring
the two closer. As in “Sacks,” the father has experienced an epiphany
that he wants to pass along to the son. After suf fering a sudden
stroke (“just a lightning bolt, and you’re left para lyzed”56) he be-
comes a fer vent believer in Christ and the bearer of a comforting,
self-serving Message: “There’s a purpose behind it all �...]” intones
the father regarding his condition, “even if we can’t see the purpose,
or at least not right off.”57 The son, for his part, is hardly convinced
of his father’s sincerity: he has the feeling that “he had planned each
sentence, had prepared himself for our meeting as if for a lecture.”58
The father’s conversion, however, has an intertextual twist to it, for
at its core is a scrambled version of the traveling-salesman story out
of “Sacks.” After the father’s stroke, he and his wife are visited re-
gularly by what he in the German original calls a “Holy Angel”
– a Bible-thumping preacher from an unnamed Christian sect. The
preacher uses the oppor tunity to secretly court the wife; both then
run off together to Portugal. In this case, though, the joke is on the
two adulterers, as the father gets religion precisely because he has
been betrayed:59
“So that’s what they’re like, I thought. That’s what’s behind all
the sanctimony. The world’s that simple. I was an enthusiastic
masochist. But,” my father said, squinting again as if laughing
ahead of time at some joke, “do you know what, my boy? My
life was only beginning. All alone? Anything but! Jesus Christ
was never so close to me as in that moment! Who are we to be
offended by those who bring us the message?”60
The father’s experience, it might be added, is social as well as mys-

tical. After his wife leaves him, the “brother and sisters” of the sect
help him regain his self-dependence and make the two potholders (em-
broidered with an eight-pointed star) which he gives to the son. The
son, in turn, hangs them right next to his stove, “so that I just have to
put out an arm whenever I need them.”61
Like Carver, Schulze uses a kind of deadpan prose that makes it
dif ficult to separate the banal from the sublime, the ironic from the
heartfelt. When Martin, the son, says he realizes his father’s story
is a real “Saul-to-Paul tale,” he’s using a common German figure of
speech. Similarly, when patrons of the café smile at the son helping the
lame father out of the restaurant to his taxi, it’s not clear whether this
occurs out of embarrassed politeness or as a spontaneous expression
of true sympathy. As in Carver, we have to carefully parse all minor
details to find out how they work together as a whole. And the sum
of these details suggests that, unlike in “Sacks,” the father’s story does
make a positive difference.
This difference isn’t a semantic one – the son doesn’t convert to
Christianity or take his father’s homilies to heart literally. What does
happen, though, is that he himself goes through a kind of “Saul-to-
Paul” conversion in his attitude towards the father. As he discov-
ers later, the father had always sought contact to his family and as-
sumed they would follow him to the West; it was his mother’s second
husband, a Party functionary, who made her send back all letters and
packages from the father.62 The son notes this changed attitude in the
introduction to his narrative, although – once more in the starkly el-
liptical fashion typical of Carver – he doesn’t tell us why:
It’s hard for me to talk about meeting my father, about how it

felt at the time, I mean, to give an account of the impression he
and his story made on me. Not because my memory’s poor – it
was barely a year ago – but because I know more now. I might
even say I’ve become a different person.63
This insight is not acquired entirely after the fact. After the father
has told his Saul-to-Paul story, the son begins to tell how his wife was
killed in a bicycle accident. Suddenly, he is moved to confess his own
irrational complicity in her fate: “I wanted Andrea to die, and then
it happened.”64 Thereupon the father absolves him of his guilt (“You
probably never really loved her, or at least not long enough”65) and,
to make the ritual complete, passes him a cookie – a communion
wafer of sorts, which the son places in his mouth and swallows. Once
more, the situation in “Sacks” is reversed: instead of a string of self-
perpetuating empty confessions, we have two “true confessions” that
in spite of their trivial trappings allow a positive, symmetrical relation-
ship between father and son to develop. The ostensive insignia of this
relation – the bracket holding together the inner and outer frame – is
provided by the two potholders Martin hangs up next to his sink.
They stand not only for the human presence of the absent father,
but also the transcendent presence of the absent Father, as embodied
in the eight-pointed star. Whether we or the hero take advantage of
the one or the other – as in Life of Pi – is a question of free choice.
The posture of believing, however, has once more been thrust on us
through the imposition of an exterior, authorially determined frame.
The posture of disbelief – of thinking that all Martin has gotten out
of the reunion are a pair of lousy potholders – turns into a trap that
makes it well nigh impossible to read this part of Simple Stories in a
satisfying or productive way.
Beautiful Otherness: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
At this point, the critically minded reader might be moved to ask

whether the experience of being trapped by an author in beautiful,
comforting frames of belief is not some insidious plot designed to keep
us from interrogating the exploitative mechanisms of global capital-
ism. Pi, although hailing from India, is not exactly your voiceless,
subaltern victim: articulate and precocious in the extreme, he leaves
a cozy middle-class existence in the Third World for an even cozier
one in the First. And, while Simple Stories doesn’t exactly present a
rosy picture of life after reunification, it tends to reconcile differences
between the ex-communist East and the capitalist West by imprint-
ing Christian symbolism and attitudes on the fabric of everyday life.
Given these examples, you might conclude that performatism is best
suited to preserving liberal bourgeois norms and values.
Performatism, however, works equally well when embedded in a
radical critique of ideology and power politics. The most prominent
example of this that I’ve been able to find is Arundhati Roy’s The God
of Small Things.66 Roy’s credentials as a critic of global capitalism are
beyond dispute: since writing her acclaimed novel, she has let loose
a whole slew of polemical broadsides against such rewarding targets
as the Indian Bomb, post-9/11 American foreign policy, and environ-
mentally destructive development projects.67 Like many postcolonial
writers, Roy is, at least in theory, resolutely anti-essentialist: she has,
for example, no patience with those of her countrymen who would
separate an “authentic” India from a “corrupted” West.
This steadfast rejection of all originary sources leads to a well-
known problem of self-definition. For if there is no essential, ultimate,
or originary truth, how can you define your own critical position in an
affirmative way? Unless you happen to be a convinced Marxist (which
Roy isn’t) the standard postmodern answer to this question up to now
was usually this: you don’t have to justify a single position because
you have continually changing positions. By taking the essentialist
conceits of a hegemonic Center at face value – and continually expos-
ing their untenability as you move along – you leave behind a dynamic
trail of discursive otherness that more than compensates for the loss
of a hard-and-fast ideological credo. In theory, this sounds good, but

in practice almost no one actually wants to live and write in this Ni-
etzschean, peripatetic mode of endless epistemological interrogation.
The result has been a repolitization of critical discourse, with explicit
ideological agendas (often Marxist) existing uneasily alongside sting-
ing critiques of essentialist truth and master narratives. Gayatri Spiv-
ak’s term “strategic essentialism,”68 which was originally supposed to
make this sort of thing seem forceful and circumspect, inadvertently
exposed the double standard lurking within it: the term sounds like
a carte blanche allowing a discrete subject with a hidden agenda (a
“strategist”) to get away with doing something that he or she would
deny to everyone else.69
At first, Roy’s own solution to this problem follows a rigorously
post-ideological pattern. In her essays as well as in her novel, she por-
trays not only India and the West, but also capitalism and Marx ism
as equivalent in terms of arrogance, despotic hubris, and destructive-
ness. A salient case is that of the Indian bomb. By building its own
bomb, India has in Roy’s view “enter�ed] into a contract with the
very people we claim to despise,” which is to say the Western societies
whose histories are “spongy with the blood of others,” and who “vir-
tually invented �...] colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing,
germ warfare, �and] chemical weapons.” 70 But just because they’re
runners-up in the race to acquire weapons of mutual mass destruc-
tion doesn’t make the Indians any better: “All in all, I think it is fair
to say that we’re the hypocrites. We’re the ones who’ve abandoned
what was arguably a moral position – i.e. we have the technol-
ogy, we can make bombs if we want to, but we won’t.” 71 This sort
of hypocrisy is no less obtrusive on a personal level. In The God of
Small Things the skirt-chasing Anglophile capitalist Chacko with his
Marxist ideology and the wife-abusing Communist nationalist Pillai
with his vested interest in a chutney factory represent two sides of
the same dismal coin. And, as Roy’s novel shows, when confronted
by a threat to its hidden interests this sort of categorical thinking can
even become lethal – as when Velutha is murdered for transgressing
against the tacit “Love Laws” proscribing sexual relations between
higher-caste members and untouchables.
Roy’s reaction to the falseness of ideology is however radically dif-

ferent from those current in postmodernism and postcolonial studies.
Although her positive program is not broadly formulated or very rig-
orous, it suggests that she regards love and beauty as the basic givens
of human interaction:
Railing against the past will not heal us. History has hap-
pened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is to change its
course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what
we don’t. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of
ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours
and beauty that we have received with grace from others, en-
hanced, re-invented and made our own. We have to seek it
out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It
doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy
us either way.72
Roy, in other words, treats mutually shared affection and plea-

sure in matters of taste – two utterly traditional metaphysical pre-
cepts – as an irreducible point of departure and a last defense against
the encroachments of a “brutal, damaged world.” The result is an
intersubjective free space, a minimal scene of love and beauty amidst
what is other wise an oppressive, violent, class-ridden, sexist and gen-
erally threatening outer realm. It goes without saying that this free
space can no longer be reconciled with postmodernism. For at its
center – hidden, fierce, and immense – stand two metaphysical im-
peratives which, at least in terms of the novel, cannot be assimilated
either to ideology or its endless, a posteriori critique. This is, as it
were, “Kant with a sari” – Roy has transplanted the basic premises
of Kantian aesthetics to the Indian subcontinent and made its focus
a supple, ebony-skinned untouchable and a lambent, wide-hipped
divorcée.73
I can’t emphasize enough that Roy’s originary scene of love and
beauty is not entirely natural or prior to culture. In its most radical
form, it is situated on the very cusp between nature and culture, at
that place where distinctions between the two seem to blend most:
in incest. When the emotionally ravaged dizygotic twins Rahel and

Estha make love at the end of the book after a long, involuntary
separation they are doing nothing more than reaffirming the possibil-
ity of productive undifferentiation, of returning to an unregulated,
discrete unity enabling them, at least in principle, to cancel out the
oppressive world of Ideology, Law and History. Their own private,
sorrowful scene is not just a union of doubles but is trinitarian: Rahel
is sister and mother in one, a genetic and psychological stand-in for
the lost, martyred mother (“She moves her mouth. Their beautiful
mother’s mouth”74). The incestuous threesome holds forth the pos-
sibility of a transcendence that is, however, not realized in the book:
what the twins share “is not happiness, but hideous grief.”75
Roy could easily have ended her story on this depressing note. As
any deconstructionist would be happy to tell you, Rahel and Estha’s
reinscription of gender relations, although an understandable reaction
to the hypocrisy of an overdifferentiated, “ideological” society, can’t
bring back the mother physically and can’t make the twins’ psyches
whole. And that is why Roy, rather than tarrying in a victimary
stance,76 chooses to place an af firmative performance at the book’s
end upholding the possibility of a love that is not just beautiful but
also productive and sublime.
This love is at its very inception revelatory and transcendent. When
Velutha first catches Ammu’s gaze “centuries telescoped into one eva-
nescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard.”77
Love is a presence, a scene transpiring between two humans in a sin-
gular, personal moment of mutually shared beauty and affection. This
scenic conception of love is repeated at the very end of the book in an
af firmative way, as a beautiful and sublime unity transcending Law
and History:
As he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps,
she saw that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged
to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees.
The fish. The stars. He moved so easily through it. As she
watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How
his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had
fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each

thing he made, had moulded him. Had left its stamp on him.
Had given him his strength, his supple grace.78
There is even something here that might, at least for a time, recon-
cile Marxists and Kantians. Unalienated beauty, it would seem, arises
on the borderline between nature and human work upon that nature,
just as the Kathakali Man – the ritual dancer of Kerala – is “the most
beautiful of men” because “his body is his soul”: it has been “polished
and pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling.”79 Some-
thing similar occurs with words, which both the narrator and her child
heroes agglutinate so as to dissolve standard grammatical boundaries
in a rhythmic, sensual way (“sourmetal smell,” “sariflapping,” “Or-
angedrink Lemondrink Man” etc.). Love, language-play, carpentry
and Kathakali are all performances erasing the secondary boundary
lines of culture, class, and caste and replacing them with a beautiful
presence which, under the right conditions, can transcend its world of
“small things” and reach up to the stars.80 The deferral of this dream
in “tomorrow,” the tragic last word of the book, isn’t meant as an ironic
put-down, but as a promise: it marks the possibility of projecting love’s
presentness into the future. The novel’s story shows that this projection
doesn’t work (it ends with the act of grievous incest); the novel’s plot
that it does (it ends with an act of sublime love). As always in performat-
ist works, we are given a clear choice as to what direction our attitude
can take. If we opt for chronology and the belatedness of the story, we
will be left with grief and desolation; if we choose the aesthetically me-
diated presence of the plot, we have the inspiration of love and a future
which we can act on in an affirmative way.
The End of Posthistory: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader
The problem of how to make history present and the future pal-
pable is something that fictional works are now also starting to recast
in performatist terms. Normally, the postmodern, posthistorical ar-
gument about writing history goes something like this: any attempt
to construct a unified history will prove illusory, since the historical
construct, inasmuch as it pretends to closed totality, will never quite

achieve identity with itself. There will always remain what Jean-Luc
Nancy calls an “excess” of meaning that is not reducible to the origi-
nal, central scheme.81 Rather than shrugging this off as an insoluble
hermeneutic bind, postmodernism turns it into a positive program.
Historical writing becomes a double strategy, combining critiques of
traditional historiography with the representation of marginalized
otherness. Instead of the neat furrow of a master narrative, history
becomes a sprawling field of overlapping incisions whose goal is to
unearth and empower the peripheral sources of historical experience
– that of the everyday, the subaltern, the victimary.
Nowhere is the problem of representing victimary experience more
acute than in discourse on the Holocaust. As Eric Gans has often
pointed out, the mass murder of the Jews in World War II (and, to
a lesser extent, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) shifted the
focus of political think ing from the utopian center to the peripheral
victim, whose fatal experience of exclusion from society became the
point of departure for progressive political thought and action.82 The
goal of politics, in other words, is no longer to adhere to the right kind
of ideology but to continually position yourself anew in opposition to
a hegemonic center – in effect, to take on the role of a virtual victim.
In the case of Nazi genocide, the lethal relation between center and
periphery leaves no room for ambivalence. Between victim and per-
petrator there can be no real reciprocity and no underlying, human-
izing unity: you’re either the murderous One or the victimary Other.
The Holocaust experience, in short, has a double potency in post-
modernist thought. It not only identifies Western culture as the center
and source of unmitigated terror,83 but also supplies a moral perspec-
tive that can be defined spatially and fluidly, as a position vis-à-vis that
center, rather than as a rigid set of counter-rules and prescriptions.
The result, as Gans suggests, is a kind of soft-hearted Nietzscheanism,
with the victim, rather than the Übermensch, acting as the jumping-off
point for a peripatetic critique of bourgeois mores.84
The term “the Holocaust,” which came into currency in the 1960s,
is itself a belated, postmodern one; it grew out of the need to make
victimary experience memorable in cultural, rather than in personal,
terms. In recent years, though, an ever widening gap has opened up

between these two kinds of experience. Little new has been added to
the vast Holocaust literature in terms of personal documentation, and
the visual and literary depictions of concentration-camp horrors are so
well known that they have either become clichés or diminished greatly
in their power to disturb us.
In late postmodernism, this ex haustion of original victimary expe-
rience has given rise to works whose means of arguing are ultimately
more aesthetic than didactic or documentary. Peter Eisenman’s Holo-
caust Memorial in Berlin, for example, has visitors wander through a
maze of huge dark gravestone-like steles reminding them forcefully
of the disorientation and vulnerability of the victim, though with-
out any specific thematic reference to the Holocaust; 85 the slashed,
jagged architecture and gaping spaces of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum in Berlin do essentially the same thing.86 In literature, a
Swiss gentile named Bruno Doessekker (aka Binjamin Wilkomirski)
identified with the victimary plight of Polish Jews so strongly that he
in effect became one and wrote a critically well-received survivor’s
memoir called Bruchstücke �Fragments]. The point is not so much
that Wilkomirski/Doessekker was a deliberate fraud – he seems to
have serious mental problems – but that a reading public accustomed
to horrific descriptions of camp life was readily willing to accept a
poetically embellished memoir which, to use Baudrillard’s felicitous
phrase, was “more real than real.” In film, there have been attempts to
stray from the well-trodden paths of victimary discourse by depicting
concentration camp victims as life-affirming, comic characters (Ro-
berto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful) or by emphasizing fragmentary, pres-
ent-day acts of remembrance over a coherent documentary exposition
(Claude Lanzman’s Shoah).
All these examples, although in their own ways successful works
of art, take victimary discourse to extremes that are at the same time
beginning to exhaust it. The fraudulent effectiveness of Wilkomir-
ski’s hyperreal memoir, the thematic emptiness of Eisenman’s Holo-
caust Memorial, Benigni’s inappropriate use of a comic genre, and
Lanzman’s staged recollections of history all suggest a basic need to
inflate, exaggerate, and embellish the customary postmodern way of
presenting the Holocaust as the non-reciprocal otherness experienced

by victims of a relentlessly cruel, monolithic center. The simulatory
effort required to renew that victimary experience has begun to com-
pete with the very thing that it seeks to enhance; we are increasingly
being confronted with modes of aesthetic excess that distract from
the victimary paradigm at least as much as they renew it. In view of
the rapidly fading sources of real experience, this increasingly exces-
sive relation between art and victimhood is becoming an unavoidable
fixture of all discourse on the Holocaust.
Given this unavoidable reassertion of aesthetics it’s justified to
ask whether there might be an alternative to victimary discourse that
would open up a perspective towards the future without rewriting his-
tory to the detriment of its victims. Although the terrain is difficult
and dangerous to tread, there are signs that books and movies are now
beginning to focus on perpetrators, the ethical choices involved in
their actions and, above all, on the possibility of atonement and recon-
ciliation that these choices imply. Of these works, the most prominent
English-language examples coming to mind are, in film, Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List and, in fiction, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is
Illuminated and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. While I can’t go into all
the implications of this shift to a perpetrator perspective here, I would
like to focus in on an example which treats these questions in a way
that is eminently typical of literary performatism. The book I have
in mind is Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader 87 – one of the few recent
German novels to become a bestseller in America and unusual in its
sympathetic treatment of a former SS prison camp guard.
Although well received by the reading public and many critics
both in and out of Germany, The Reader was met with icy reserve by
those writers who noticed its deviations from the unwritten norms of
victimary discourse (the book was sometimes lumped together with
Wilkomirski’s as an example of “disturbing” holocaust literature).88
There is, however, a considerable aesthetic difference between the two
works. Whereas Wilkomirski’s book simply carries virtual identifica-
tion with the victimary to its logical extreme, The Reader breaks with
postmodernist norms by framing or artificially uniting victims and a
perpetrator in closed, ritualistic scenes.
The first frame, in a Nazi work camp in Poland, is perverse

and cruel. In what seems to be an act of childish narcissism, an all-
powerful illiterate – Hanna – forces doomed Jewish bearers of writ-
ten culture to make that culture present by reading to her out loud.
Hanna seems to crave Bildung but can acquire it only through the
application of brute force; in doing so she aids and abets a genocidal
system.89 (You might call this Kant with a cattle prod: a natural dispo-
sition towards enlightenment is coupled with pure, murderous power
over scapegoated victims.)
In the second frame, Hanna repeats the reading relationship, but
now replaces physical power (Macht) with a mixture of sexual power
(Kraft) and maternal solicitude: she becomes a lover and ersatz mother
for the underage hero Michael. Unlike the first frame, however, this
ritualistic relationship, though still unequal, contains an element of
reciprocity. The ritual enables Michael to continually reenact an ideal,
incestuous initiation into manhood;90 Hanna’s sexual contact with
an innocent allows her to repeat the camp ritual in a purified way (in
symbolic terms, this is why the protagonists bathe before having sex
and reading: they are both trying to preserve and renew what is for
them a self-fashioning sacral scene). Although consensual, the affair
nonetheless eventually deforms Michael; after Hanna’s departure he is
unable to enter into long-term relationships with other women.
In the third frame, in prison, the ritual relationship is played out
again in a desexualized and depersonalized way. Hanna becomes, at
least outwardly, a morally autonomous, enlightened individual: she
not only learns to read on her own, but also demonstrates civil courage
(she engages in a sit-down protest when funds for the prison library
are to be cut off). Eventually, she levies the severest possible judg-
ment on herself by committing suicide at the very moment where she
would have been allowed to reenter society in a well-organized and
comfortable way. In effect, she resists resocialization by entering into
a symbolic frame of a higher order – that of the dead victims, who, as
she says, are the only ones who really understand her.91
Michael, by contrast, manages to rid himself of the frame in a
symbolic act of reduction and restitution. Although the Jewish sur-
vivor of Hanna’s crime is unwilling to accept the money Hanna has
saved up, she does take the tin it was kept in (replacing a similar one
stolen from her in the camps and suggesting the symbolic undoing
of a past injustice). This ending suggests that two autonomous sub-
jects – a victim and a stand-in for a perpetrator – are larger than the
frames that seem to enclose them. The frame, however, remains a real,
indispensable means of symbolic communication between the two:
even if they can’t agree on the content of the frame – the survivor re-
jects the money inside it – they can tacitly agree on its mediating and
consolatory power. This transaction, though without intrinsic value,
confirms the originary mechanism of the ostensive and hence the pos-
sibility of a future, as yet deferred rapprochement.
Reviewing The Reader’s main features we can discern without dif-
ficulty two major fault lines running between it and the usual post-
modern treatment of the Holocaust. The first such break is marked by
the book’s metaphysical optimism. Schlink appears to see the world,
or, more precisely, the frame at hand, as something that is always open
to betterment, albeit in an incremental or incomplete way. The Reader
doesn’t necessarily present us with a less damning picture of German
complicity in genocide than postmodernism did – the book makes no
attempt to excuse Hanna’s crime or deny the suffering of her victims.
The Reader does however suggest that people – and in particular perpe-
trators – are enclosed in ritualized frames at least partially of their
own making, and that these frames can change (or be changed) for
the better over time. This contrasts starkly with the metaphysical pes-
simism of postmodernism, which would condemn us to simulate end-
lessly a victimary condition now lying three full generations behind
us. Using a fictional scenario, The Reader demonstrates the possibility
of framed, individually constructed historical change rather than the
Eternal Return of the Slightly Different.
The second radical break with postmodern norms is The Reader’s
insistence on framed identification with a perpetrator as well as on
the common origin (not the common moral status) of perpetrator
and victim. The Reader’s postmodern and/or psychoana lytic critics
were quick to point out that the book maneuvers us into identifying
with a perpetrator and her lover, who is in a sense both her accom-
plice and victim.92 From a postmodernist perspective, which allows
no commonality or reciprocity between victim and perpetrator, this

forced identification with a perpetrator is accompanied by a fatal quid
pro quo. According to this view, Schlink causes Michael to usurp the
victimary position usually occupied by the Jews, but only at the cost
of encasing him in an obsessive, sexually charged shell that effectively
shuts out all moral reflection.93 In this interpretation, Michael is bur-
dened by the “inability to mourn,” which is to say by the inability to
rid himself of his obsession with his narcissistic love-object Hanna.
Michael, it would seem, is condemned to repeat the experience of
the entire German people, who, in the sweeping vision of the psycho-
analysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, redirected their libid-
inal energy after the war into “derealizing” or repressing the memory
of Nazi crimes and their own self-serving love of Hitler.94 The cure re-
commended by the Mitscherlichs in 1967 was, incidentally, precisely
that drastic confrontation with images of heaped-up corpses that has
since grown into a visual cliché.95 This remedy is repeated in one form
or another by The Reader’s postmodern critics, who urge us to reflect
once more on “the incommensurability of the victimary perspective
and the experience of the perpetrator collective”96 or, in a more reso-
lute Nietzschean mode, to grapple with the possibility that the defin-
ing feature of humanity is its ability to inflict an infinite amount pain
on others for no particular reason.97
As such, it is no surprise that postmodern and psychoanalytically
minded critics reject out of hand a book that shows how a perpetrator
develops morally in terms of closed, ritualized frames. In themselves,
these frames – the work camp, the secret affair with a minor, the prison
– are at worst cruel and at best ambivalent. However, they help create
inner scenes of self-fashioning which, though flawed and constricted,
allow Hanna to transcend the previous frame that she happened to
be caught up in. This sort of ritualized, spatially staggered individua-
tion fits in well with the sociological concept of framing developed by
Erving Goffman in the tradition of Emile Durk heim.98 Goffman sees
patterns of everyday behavior as transpiring within social frames or
codes that enable individuals to maintain a modicum of dignity and
selfhood under trying or embarrassing circumstances (these frames
are in turn thought to represent the secularized remnants of what
was once a universally binding religious experience99). This closed,

face-to-face mode of individuation stands directly opposed to the
Nietzschean-Freudian one, which demands that subjects forthrightly
bare their psyches in a virtual, open-ended confrontation with the
over whelming terror of the Holocaust – a confrontation in which the
subject can by definition never win. The Reader, it would seem, argues
implicitly against the kind of over-intellectualized, self-accusatory
type of discourse that has long characterized the Holocaust discussion
in Germany.
The ultimate scandal associated with The Reader is however its
“confusion” of victimary and perpetrator roles. Once more, The Read-
er never conflates these issues in a moral or legal sense. There is never
any doubt about Hanna’s guilt, and in spite of Michael’s identifica-
tion with her (which we share in a vicarious, but guarded way) she
never becomes the object of false, unmediated sentiment.100 The true
scandal from a postmodern perspective is that the illiterate Hanna’s
actions are motivated by a fear of being socially stigmatized and scape-
goated – precisely that fate that is visited upon the Jewish victims of
Nazi genocide. Hanna is subject along with the Jews to what René
Girard would call the victimage mechanism, an originary event in
which societies seek to distract from the mimetic rivalry within them
by lynching innocent victims.101 The crimes perpetrated by Hanna
(whose Germanic name is homonymous with the Hebrew Hannah)
arise from her own private fear of that potential victimage; in fact,
that fear is so powerful that it later causes her to incriminate herself in
court in a wholly irrational, self-defeating way. In the same way, Han-
na’s grotesque misuse of Jewish prisoners to acquire Bildung suggests
that she is has no fear whatsoever of being contaminated by their ra-
cially defined otherness. Hanna’s ritualized, narcissistic framing of her
own self – her basic state of opacity – makes her immune to pressure
from the victimizing community, but also to abstract legal reasoning
and racist ideology. In the end, as Bill Niven has pointed out, Hanna
doesn’t even really become a morally autonomous individual, in spite
of her immersion in Holocaust literature and the classics of bourgeois
culture.102 Rather, by sacrificing herself through suicide, she remains
true to the victimage mechanism. In a final act of sacrificial hubris she
expels herself from society, in effect preferring to deify herself as a vic-

tim rather than reenter society as an autonomous, morally responsible
individual.
The Reader doesn’t try to justify Hanna’s obvious moral deficits or
her complicity in mass murder. It does, however, recast the problem
of reckoning with the Holocaust in terms of frames in which a com-
bination of love, enlightenment, and coercion enable the slow, albeit
incomplete restitution of an autonomous moral conscience. The book
encourages us, along with Michael, to believe in Hanna’s step-by-step
redemption; although this belief is only partially fulfilled, it also en-
ables us, along with Michael, to break with a cycle of endless mourn-
ing over a traumatic past. In spite of Schlink’s metaphysical optimism
– marked by his implanting an unquenchable desire for culture in an
unlikely heroine – The Reader doesn’t enthrone that desire as the linear,
progressive accumulation of sweetness and light. This is because the
frame is both a haven and a burden. While creating a ritualized free
space in which a subject may develop more or less on his or her own
terms, the frame at the same times cuts the subject off from the public
domain in which that development could achieve general acceptance.
In the long run it is neither the frame itself nor its content taken
alone that are essential for progress, but rather a positive performance
that transcends both. This performance is, I think, embodied in the
symbolic transaction between Michael and the Jewish sur vivor. The
frame – the tin – is not discarded or denied, but instead becomes a con-
crete, unified (ostensive) sign of a perpetrator’s desire for redemption
and a victim’s desire to undo the horrific experience of the victimary
past. Projected onto a common object, these two mutually exclusive
perspectives allow us to believe that we can transcend the past, for
without this belief we are condemned to repeat it endlessly. The de-
construction of this double projection – which is once more not ter-
ribly hard to do – throws us back into a cycle of virtual mourning;
its acceptance creates a framed, minimal moment of presence that
would allow us to move forward into the future. The danger is not
so much that we are going to succumb uncritically to old illusions,
as the posthistorical critique insinuates,103 but that we are going to
miss out on the future by endlessly simulating an increasingly hazy,
emotionally distant past. The performatist projection doesn’t seek to

blot out that past and plunge blindly into the future; instead, it of-
fers a frame grounded in presence that mediates between the two.
Given the rapid waning of real historical experience and the aesthetic
excesses that inevitably accompany the simulation of that experience,
the performatist projection offers a very real perspective for moving,
frame by frame, out of the seemingly endless expanse of posthistory.
Conclusion
The examples discussed here suggest that the switch to a radical

monist, post-millennial, or performatist kind of consciousness is not
going to cause writers to burst out in hosannas to global capitalism.
What it does mean, though, is that the ironic act of displaying your
political impotence on the one hand and flaunting your epistemo-
logical superiority on the other is becoming increasingly obsolete as
a literary device. By contrast, the rise of radical monism – and here
one must emphasize the word “radical” – appears to meet a real cul-
tural need to create spatially discrete identities or performances within
global capitalism that would enable whole, beautiful, or spiritualized
pockets of resistance to arise within it.
Using the examples I have discussed here as a rough guide, you
could speak of a “right” and “left” path to this goal. The “right” meth-
od is not uncritical of capitalism. However, it tries to work within it
by creating inspirational projections in its inner space (by aspirating
what Sloterdijk calls spheres or foams – whole bubbles of belief, faith,
truth etc.). The “left” strategy corresponds roughly to the attempt
to amalgamate variegated otherness into an appealing, tasteful object
of cultural identity (a nice hot chutney, so to speak). This strategy
seems particularly appropriate to postcolonial writers, as it would al-
low them to reify attributes from their own cultures that are at the
same time universally binding or “necessary” for others to enjoy in the
Kantian sense.
Finally, there is also a “terrorist” alternative suggesting the possibil-
ity of a total critique of capitalism that takes place in the mode of “as
if.” The terrorist aesthete plays va banque with the sublime possibility
of a radical monist alternative to capitalism, postmodern society or

Western culture per se – all, of course, within the ostensive confines of
a fictional frame. This perspective is, interestingly enough, indigenous
to Eastern Europe, where the annihilation of capitalism is treated as
a metaphysical rather than as a real possibility. In Russia the main
proponent of this line is Viktor Pelevin, whose work has been touched
on in Chapter One.104 A recent Czech example is Miloš Urban’s Sev-
enchurch. A Gothic Novel of Prague,105 whose basic plot motif is the
struggle for control over post-postmodern space and form. Echoing
an old theme of Czech culture, the book sets the Gothic style of the
Czech high Middle Ages against the Baroque of the Counterreforma-
tion, whose onset coincided with the long-term loss of Czech national
sovereignty. The main protagonists of Sevenchurch are all enthusias-
tic, if not to say fanatical, admirers of the Gothic and detractors of
the Baroque, whose ornamental bombast and playful superficiality
are clearly reminiscent of postmodernism. The Gothic, by contrast, is
declared to be the only epoch at all capable of realizing architectonic
transcendence, “it realized the victory of spirit over matter in human
dwellings. In all preceding and following epochs exactly the opposite
was the case.”106
The hero and narrator of the novel, a failed history student and ex-
policeman named Švach, is gradually initiated into the plans of a mys-
terious sect that seeks to roll back democracy in favor of a medieval
regime. The novel takes the form of a detective story emphasizing the
sublime, “gothic” side of the narrator-hero’s perspective as he uncovers
ever new atrocities and eavesdrops on ominous sexual practices (part
of which, incidentally, takes place in the corridors of a dark, laby-
rinthine hotel). After the zenith of sublime terror has been achieved
– the hero is subjected to a fake execution – we find out that the sect
has already achieved its goal. Švach, who has now become a faithful
disciple of the group, informs us that the center of Prague has been cut
off from the surrounding world and is being ruled according to the
cruel dictates of the “wonderful, beatific 14th century.”107
As in “Hotel Capital,” Sevenchurch forces a spatially defined mo-
nist order upon the reader. However, this odd novelistic performance
is neither ideological in nature – the real-life Urban is not a closet
monarchist – nor can it be explained as an exercise in infinite post-

modern regress. Rather, we are confronted with a setup or frame
similar to that in “Hotel Capital.” The point is not that we actually
identify with the sect’s claims about Gothic style, but that we more or
less involuntarily assume a position of terrified awe vis-à-vis the text.
Upon finishing the book, we are transfixed and stunned by its repre-
sentation of the victory of a whole, monist order without necessarily
agreeing with its actual content.108
All in all, Sevenchurch allows us to assume the cognitive position
of a terrorist without having to share his or her practical interests.
This sublime or terrorist monism comprises a necessary counterpart to
the monolithic capitalist world order, whose metaphysical destruction
must take place all at once in order to be truly gratifying (we will
recall: in the Butlerian ambience of Hotel World the unshakeable he-
gemony of global capitalism is expressly confirmed: resistance takes
place only partially, in a mode of murky, haphazard solidarity among
victims). Rather than basking in a victimary mode Sevenchurch em-
ploys a high aesthetic that allows you to shoot off your resentment all
at once in the framework of a sublime projection. All this, needless to
say, takes place in a atmosphere of self-irony suggesting that totally
transcending capitalism is a possible, but not a viable option. For bet-
ter or worse, we are stuck inside the whole of capitalism, and these and
similar works suggest that authors in the new epoch are starting to
deal with this situation on their own terms.
Chapter 3
Performatism in the Movies
Had I set out to write an aesthetic assessment of artistically ambi-

tious movies fifteen years ago, my discussion would have been heavily
skewed towards such topics as otherness, undecidability, belatedness,
and ironic regress – in short, towards the devices and ways of know-
ing normally associated with postmodernism. As examples, I might
have singled out movies like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Jim
Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), Lars von Trier’s Europa (1990), Jon-
athan Demme’s Something Wild (1987), or the Coen brothers’ Barton
Fink (1991). And, had I ventured a glance into the future, I would
almost certainly have predicted that the ironic perspective, deferred
identifications, and metaphysical pessimism of these films would con-
tinue on seamlessly into an endless posthistorical future. Beginning
sometime in the mid-to-late 1990’s, however, a massive sea change in
the subject matter and focus of independently made movies began to
take place. These movies, which all bore the imprint of sophisticated
auteur sensibility, began to do curious things. They starting treating
themes of identity, reconciliation, and belief. They forced viewers to
identify with single-minded characters and their sacrificial, redemp-
tive acts. And, as if all this were not enough, they began to set up dra-
matically staged, emotionally moving denouements. As milestones in
this development you could cite productions like Lars von Trier’s Idi-
ots (1997) and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998); Jim Jar-
musch’s Ghost Dog (1999); Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1999); and,
in mainstream cinema, the Oscar-winning American Beauty (1999).
Before the year 2000, it might still have been possible to write off this
sort of movie as a sentimental aberration. Since then, however, dozens
of important and striking films have appeared that follow this same
threefold pattern. Indeed, it has become increasingly hard to find seri-
ous movies wholly committed to postmodernist themes and strategies,
and it is becoming increasingly hard to apply poststructuralist theory

in a productive way to the new type of film.
In the following discussion, I wish to apply the notion of per-
formatism developed in the previous chapters to film. In terms of
plot, this requires no great adjustments. The basic rule of the double
frame applies the same way to movies as it does to narrative literature.
Inner frames (or originary scenes) have to “lock” with outer ones,
otherwise no performance – no move by an opaque subject towards
transcendence – is possible. Movies, however, also employ specific
audio-visual means requiring a theoretical frame of reference of their
own. Using Gilles Deleuze’s deist theory of cinema as a foil, I have
constructed a theist, performatist alternative that I think is better
suited to explaining the current innovations now taking place in con-
temporary cinema.
When talking about movies systematically in any way, you are
usually faced at some point with the choice between mainstream
Hollywood productions or so-called art movies. As it turned out,
the nature of my topic – epochal innovation – didn’t allow for too
much leeway. Hollywood does turn out innovative movies, but for
the most part tends to sugarcoat the themes and devices I’m inter-
ested in (Tom Hanks movies like Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and The
Green Mile are a case in point). The main problem with art mov-
ies, by contrast, is accessibility. Not being a festival-hopping pro-
fessional critic, I decided to concentrate on European movies and
North American independent productions that are readily available
on video or DVD. For compa rison’s sake, though, I have included in
my collection several bona fide mainstream Hollywood movies such
as David Fincher’s Panic Room or the Jack Nicholson vehicle About
Schmidt. Needless to say, it would have been possible to expand
greatly the selection of movies to which performatism can be said to
apply. To make the discussion manageable I’ve restricted myself to
about fifteen striking examples; towards the end of the chapter I’ve
devoted a separate discussion to three movies that are particularly
interesting in cinematographic terms: The Coen Brothers’ The Man
Who Wasn’t There, Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Russian Ark, and Chris-
topher Nolan’s Memento.
Performatism in the Movies 81
Framing in Performatist Film
As in narrative genres in literature, performatist movie plots are

centered around inner or ostensive frames. These frames, although
very different in their individual details, resemble the originary os-
tensive scene in the sense that they create a constructed or artificial
proximity between things, people, and simple physical acts. As is the
case with originary ostensivity, they have both an immanent (human)
and a transcendent side to them. These two sides – the immanent
and the putatively transcendent – interact in peculiar ways to generate
performatist plot patterns.
In their anthropological, “psychological” guise these scenes form
by more-or-less spontaneous agreement among characters, tend to
be unstable, and are marked by an element of deceit. When the
two lovers in Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy meet to copulate without ex-
changing words, they create precisely this kind of scene in an erotic,
human mode. When Amélie (in the eponymous movie) “plays God”
by returning a small box of toys to the lonely man who as a child
once hid them away, she creates a revelatory scene which is accepted
by the man as an everyday miracle. When the seven unfortunate
characters in the science-fiction thriller Cube wake up for no good
reason in a very large and extremely dangerous labyrinth of inter-
connected boxes, the scene challenges them to act in an ethically
coherent way to get out. Although the movie suggests that the frame
is man-made, we never learn exactly who made it or why. The frame
itself remains an ineffable origin, as if God-given; the characters in
it show their humanity – or lack of it – in trying to overcome its
lethal traps.
The thing-related closure experienced in such primary scenes acts
as a ground for the rest of the plot. To work, the constructed ur-scene
must be confirmed somewhere else on the higher, authorial level of the
outer frame. If this occurs, it enables the protagonists and ourselves
us to experience such scenes as part of a greater, transcendent frame,
and thus as ethical, beautiful, or sublime. Beauty and sublimity are
constructed, for example, when Ricky Fitts deifies a white plastic bag
in American Beauty, and a kind of ethical beauty is generated when
Amélie sets up her little traps in which people “discover” small objects
that bring happiness to them. One of the most poignant such ethical
moments, in Lars von Trier’s Idiots, involves two Hell’s Angels, an
exposed penis, and an act of urination – you have to see it to believe
it.1 Depending on theme and plot, however, many other variations
are possible, including suspense and comedy. In David Fincher’s slick
Hollywood production Panic Room, for example, the primary frame
is a trap, with the designer of the safe room trying to break back into
his own creation. In Spike Jonze’s brilliant, bizarre comedy Being John
Malkovich the primary frame – John Malkovich himself – is patently
absurd, as are the magical principles governing its usage.
Inner frames in themselves do not necessarily lead to greater real-
ism, and certainly not to any sort of authenticity. The sex practiced by
the breathless, physically rather ordinary couple in Intimacy may ap-
pear “realistic” to us against the background of dreamily filmed Hol-
lywood sex scenes. However, there is nothing particularly authentic or
natural about their trysts, which are based on a kind of contractual
agreement (which dissolves anyway as the movie goes on). Similarly,
there is nothing intrinsically authentic about the digitalized movie
of a plastic bag whipping around in the wind in American Beauty or
about Amélie’s little pranks, which take place in an idealized Mont-
marte and are based on well-meant deceit. Artistic ostensivity involves
a performance that creates ethical beauty or sublimity and occludes
meaning. However, this is possible only because of a fit between an
inner scene and a higher, authorial will that causes that ethical beauty
or sublimity to occur, or that meaning to be shut out. There is noth-
ing at all authentic about this spontaneous agreement, and indeed it is
always accompanied by resentful suspicion – intrinsic to the ostensive
sign – that someone is benefiting from it more than he or she should.
Performatist art tries to frame and contain this resentment, to cre-
ate scenes or constructs in which viewers or peripheral characters can
identify with a central, often sacrificial experience to the point where
they can benefit from it themselves. The point of performatism is not
to restore the dogmatic authority of the center, but rather to return, if
only temporarily, to the originary scene as way of reviving the osten-
sive experience of love, beauty, and reconciliation.
I cannot emphasize enough that this “return” to originary scenes

is an artificially arranged journey subject to ironic twists and turns
of its own. One of the most effective and moving attempts to portray
a lengthy sojourn in ostensivity is the Russian movie Kukushka (The
Cuckoo), which, unfortunately, has not been widely distributed in the
West. In Kukushka, the circumstances of the Russo-Finnish war in
1944 throw together three people who don’t understand one another’s
language: a young Lapp woman whose husband is lost in the war,
a Russian officer who was betrayed to the secret police by a trusted
underling, and a Finnish sniper fighting for the Germans (who have
in turn betrayed him). Unable to explain the nuances of their politi-
cal and personal plight to the others, all have to make do with purely
ostensive means of communication (dubbed-in oral translations allow
us to understand what the Finnish and Lapp characters are actually
saying). Trying to demonstrate to the Russian that he is a former stu-
dent and not a Nazi, for example, the Finn helplessly yells at him us-
ing the only Russian words that he knows: “Tolstoy – War and Peace!
Dostoevsky – The Idiot!” Not surprisingly, this sort of ostensive com-
munication doesn’t lead to any natural sort of rapprochement. In fact,
just before he learns the war is over the Russian grievously wounds the
Finn, whom he thinks is a convinced Nazi.
Kukushka vividly demonstrates the multiple ironies that arise when
we, as creatures of semiotic complexity and nuance, are forced to re-
turn to direct, non-narrative modes of communication. The movie
could have chosen to make a shambles out of this irony: instead, it
presents us with a happy end based on feeling and being rather than
on knowing. At the movie’s conclusion, the young Lapp woman tells
her two twin sons (who could have been fathered by either the Finn
or the Russian) an idealized – and false – version of who their fathers
were and how they got along. This falsification isn’t intentional: the
Lapp woman simply never did understand the things that happened
out of her immediate line of sight and that were “explained” to her
in Finnish or Russian. None of the three characters, in fact, will ever
understand exactly what happened to them in the ostensive situation;
all, however, are able to overcome the resentment and rivalry inherent
to it. As viewers, we know that the characters lack this understanding,
but we identify with their ability to transcend all the same. The post-
modern moment of knowing is contained in the aesthetic gesture of
the movie; it is simply not intended to be the last word.
Just how the resentment arising out of a primary or ostensive scene
is dealt with in narrative is a problem of intermediate frames. These
frames “compete” in a certain sense with the primary frames estab-
lished by or around key characters. Examples of a fatal competition
would be that between the Samurai frame of Ghost Dog in the epony-
mous movie and the Mafia frame of his “master” Louie. Through
Ghost Dog’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film, however, it is clear
that the competition is one-sided. Although the Mafia code triumphs
in a purely physical sense, Ghost Dog’s samurai ethos is successfully
carried over to a little girl, who will presumably continue the struggle
in a non-violent, more spiritualized way. This sort of struggle is even
more intense in Cube, where seven differently “framed” characters
– an architect, an escape artist, a policeman, an autist etc. – help and
hinder one another trying to get out of an enormous, inexplicable
labyrinth. The beneficiary of this process is the person with the sim-
plest frame, the autist Kazan, who at the same time represents a new,
minimal origin. Once more, it is absolutely imperative that the inner
frame lock into the outer one, creating a coherent event or denoue-
ment within the work in question.
When postmodernists misinterpret performatist works it is almost
always because they think that there is only kind of legitimate frame:
the intermediate one. This corresponds, in effect, to the Derridean
notion of the parergon: it is that which mediates between inside and
out while being reducible to neither.2 The irreducible frame (a.k.a.
différance, pharmakon, hymen, trace, gramme etc.) becomes the focal
point of interest, even though (or, more likely, exactly because) it itself
does not represent anything in particular and fails to bring about the
closure it seems to promise. Performatist works of art, of course, also
allow contradictory and/or deceptive intermediate frames to develop.
However, if the work is to remain performatist, such frames must al-
ways be locked into a kind of full nelson between the primary and the
outer frame, which do stake out binding positions within the world
of the narrative. The existence of such a basic narrative lock or fit
between outside and in is the crucial element defining a performatist

work, and, from a postmodernist point of view, its most disturbing
and unacceptable feature. 3
Outer frames (or work frames) give performatist works their pecu-
liar unpostmodern fit or feel. The outer frame deliberately creates a
monolithic point of view forcing the viewer back “into” the work (in
this sense you could say that the movie itself becomes one giant os-
tensive sign which the viewer must accept or reject in one fell swoop).
Instead of constantly intertwining the inner space of the work with
the endless outer space of the context, as Derrida prescribes, the outer
frame drives a wedge between the work and its context. It forces us, at
least temporarily, to perceive the outer space as a blank, transcendent
Beyond, and it forces us to focus back in on and privilege certain ob-
jects, acts or persons in the work. The outer frame, in short, creates
the temporarily binding conditions that cause mundane objects, acts
or people to become beautiful or ethical, sanctified or sublime. For
example, the famous white plastic bag in American Beauty that Ricky
Fitts thinks is beautiful would not appear so to us if it did not turn
up again in the outer frame of the movie narrated by the now deified
Lester Burnham. Similarly, in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark you
would not give a hoot about a half-blind Czech factory worker, her
money troubles, or her passion for schmaltzy musicals if she did not
sacrifice herself in such an ostentatious and “fitting” way at the end
of the movie (she foregoes the money needed for her defense so that it
may be used for her son’s eye operation).
Postmodernists, by contrast, tend to think of outer frames either as
instruments of hegemonial repression or as supplemental frippery that
can be ignored at will. This applies to anyone, for example, who thinks
American Beauty is nothing more than a scathing deconstruction of
American middle-class life. If you believe this, you will also believe
that the frame represented by the deified narrator is little more than
an odd device that helps wrap up the social criticism practiced within
the movie (interestingly enough, if do so, you will be taking the po-
sition Derrida ascribed to Kant in The Truth in Painting, i.e., you
will write off the sacralizing frame as a mere ornament). Performatist
outer frames always do something to a viewer, so that he or she – at
least temporarily – resists being sucked up in the infinite regress of

discourse so dear to postmodernism. In keeping with Goffman and
Gans, you could say that the outer frame (in its “lock” with the inner
one) makes the work itself into a scene to which the viewer or reader
reacts in a cult-like, ritualistic way. Additionally, the frame of the per-
formatist work “buys time” for viewers to plunge back into the scene
and be affected by it once more, rather than leading them out into an
endless tangle of spatial and temporal traces from which there is no
return.
Ultimately, of course, the performatist outer frame is not imper-
meable or inviolable. Performatist works, in fact, are probably no less
rich in citations and allusions than any others (a notable example is
The Man Who Wasn’t There, which draws heavily and obviously on
noir classics like Murder, My Lovely and Double Indemnity). Also, the
rigid outer frame cannot and should not be exempted from ideological
and metaphysical critiques. As a general rule of thumb, though, the
more closed and restrictive the narrative outer frame, the more perfor-
matist it will “feel” to the viewer, and the greater will be its aesthet-
ic-ritualistic impact. In this sense performatist movies tend towards
the “closed” type of film described by Leo Braudy.4 In such movies,
as Braudy suggests, “plot and pattern seem imposed from above,”5
and the viewer has the feeling of being entrapped and manipulated.
However, unlike the malevolent atmosphere projected in the movies
of Braudy’s “closed” directors like Hitchcock and Lang, performa-
tist films use rigid outer frames to suggest the existence of a redeem-
ing transcendency, of a purifying Beyond outside the film. When the
exposed and humiliated child-abusing patriarch in Vinterberg’s The
Celebration voluntarily leaves the family gathering to exit forever into
the blinding glare of the morning sun, then this is just such a redemp-
tive ending. The toppled patriarch has now become the scapegoat of
the family collective; his expulsion from the group is not just an act
of belated justice, but also one of sacralization in the sense used by
René Girard.6 The evil patriarch will become a Danish family deity;
he will be transported into a realm of “white” myth from which the
regrouped collective will continue to derive solace and inner strength
from having defeating him.
Here, a poststructuralist might object that the collective is simply

whitewashing a trauma in order to preserve the paternal, phallic or-
der. And, indeed, as Derrida likes to say, there is no way of prevent-
ing anyone from taking this kind of stance. However, such a viewer
will have missed the point of the movie, which is to make us identify
with the ability of a lifelong victim to transcend his victimary status
in a way that is also productive for the community around him. The
performatist work shows how it feels to be a victim of incest, and it
shows how a corrupted social frame can be rejuvenated in order to
accommodate what evidently remains a very basic problem of human
interaction. This rejuvenation, in turn, can only be done by framing
– by artificially focusing in on – the victim’s debasement, which is re-
vealed and ritually reenacted before the eyes of all. In The Celebration,
Christian’s revelation of his own victimization causes him to be tem-
porarily expelled from the group, thus offering himself as a scapegoat
– but also as a medium of redemption for the family, who tacitly aided
and abetted the father.
By contrast, in Derrida’s way of thinking, which transforms ev-
erything from defloration to the threat of nuclear war into an endless
skein of discursive paradoxes, the victim’s psychological and physical
plight is never made the focus of a centered identification. Instead,
victims are compensated with a privileged, elusive position allowing
them to act as the critical, incontrovertible Other of whatever hege-
monic force happens to be weighing down on them. In a Derridean
world, Christian’s victimary experience would have been intellectual-
ized and sublimated in a network of decentered sign relations rather
than played out again in a simplistic and rather obvious ritual; the
Derridean dynamic allows no performance or scene that you could
identify with directly.
Performatism also has “open” films. However, these are construct-
ed differently than postmodern conundrums or the sort of cinematic
waltzes through reality described by Siegfried Kracauer. Examples of
fairly open performatist films would be the Norwegian comedy Elling,
Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, and Tom Tykwer’s The Princess
and the Warrior. Elling’s hero, a self-proclaimed “mother’s son,” must
be pulled out of a closet by the police after his dominating mother dies.
Cast out of a mental institution into the world, he gradually acquires

the ability to overcome the spatial and social frames confining him.
In the end, he walks the city streets at night – still a “mother’s son,” as
he says, but now also an unknown urban poet (he publishes by plac-
ing his poetry in miniature frames – boxes of sauerkraut that he buys
and returns to the supermarket). Elling has transcended the series of
closed institutional spaces confining him, yet still remains true to the
kernel of his own closed-in self, which is the result of an imposed ma-
triarchal order and not an authentic state of being or knowledge.
In Being John Malkovich the openness is rooted in the absurd outer
frame of the movie, which suggests that human “vessels” can be oc-
cupied by other people, thus allowing them to live forever. At the end,
a new vessel – a little girl – is ogled by the old vessel – John Malkov-
ich – and the film gives us to understand that the framing process
will be continued ad infinitum. And, in Tykwer’s The Princess and
the Warrior, the two main characters, having successfully fled from a
sanatorium where the “Princess” works, escape to a cottage facing out
onto the vast, sublime expanse of an open, unmarked body of water
– itself a larger incarnation of the live-saving pond into which the two
lovers leapt from the hospital rooftop. This kind of leap into transcen-
dence is even more pronounced (or overdone, as the case may be) in
Tykwer’s Heaven, in which the two fleeing protagonists hijack a police
helicopter and literally disappear into the sky. Openness in Tykwer’s
movies is practically identical with the experience of sublimity, of a
transcendent, unfathomable limit.
Openness can also result from ambivalence in the outer frame (not
to be confused with undecidability, which as an aesthetic device rubs
your nose in the fact that you can never definitively know what is go-
ing on in a movie’s plot). Intimacy doesn’t really end happily – the two
lovers Claire and Jay part forever – but it seems clear that Jay, whose
jealousy and curiosity destroyed the silent relationship, has actually
fallen in love with Claire. Their last meeting is “consecrated,” as it
were, by the near presence of the gay French bartender Ian, who is
the only person in the movie with a positive attitude toward human
relationships (earlier on, when Jay cynically “confesses” that he meets
a woman just to copulate with her in silence, Ian earnestly replies that
“it’s not often you come across somebody who wants the same thing”
– a perfect formulation of the ostensive scene in an erotic mode). It’s
not clear what will happen to the protagonists – hence the openness
– but the movie does suggest that it is possible to love, even if the re-
alization comes belatedly.
Something comparable also happens in About Schmidt, in which
the widowed, retired hero is forced into conflicts with practically all
the conventional social frames surrounding him. Although he doesn’t
succeed in transcending these frames in a satisfying way, it would
seem that he nonetheless experiences a kind of epiphany at the very
end of the movie (Schmidt bursts into tears upon receiving a draw-
ing from his African foster child that shows two stick figures next
to one another holding hands). We’re not sure what will happen to
Schmidt after this, but it seems certain that this confrontation with an
originary, scenic affirmation of human love has moved him in some
fundamental way. The ostensive implication of the drawing – which
Schmidt appears to understand – is that a loving relationship is still
possible between humans anywhere, under any social circumstances,
and in spite of all conventional trappings.
From Deism to Theism
One way of thinking of the shift from postmodernism to perfor-

matism is to conceive of it as shift from a radically deist notion of the
world to a radically theist one. Regarding film, this theological subtext
must be taken quite literally. This is because the most incisive and
comprehensive postmodern theory of film, that of Gilles Deleuze,7 is
based on an entirely conscious use of the deist metaphysics developed
by Leibniz and continued later by Bergson. In this tradition, the no-
tion of a personal God is replaced by a dynamic, constantly shifting
relation between parts and a whole. By definition, the whole repre-
sents a virtual field of possibility that the parts actualize in their own
dynamic, individual ways. Leibniz, whose frame of reference is mainly
metaphysical, calls the virtual whole “God” and the parts “monads.”
For Bergson the virtual whole becomes Time; for Deleuze, “cinema”
or “meta-cinema.” Unlike his predecessors, Deleuze considers the parts
to be fairly arbitrary; they can be just about anything that is physi-

cally set off from the never-ending flow of energy coursing through
the world. Deleuze, for example, treats what he calls “frames” (mise
en scène), “shots,” “images,” and even “faces” in pretty much the same
way that Leibniz speaks of monads. Each part actualizes the virtual
whole of the movie (or the virtual whole of all movies); at the same
time, the virtual whole is constituted by the specific inner dynamic of
the image unfolding within it. The part, which represents a certain
segment of movement through the whole, is defined by the whole,
while the whole, in its virtual plenitude, eludes anything but partial,
constantly shifting perceptions of what it might be in toto. Deleuzian
concepts reverberate with this radically relational, decentered logic,
which is meant to cut through our spatially fixed concepts and tap
into the virtual, open Whole of relations around them – much in the
same way that Bergson wants us to cut through our spatially fixed
concepts in the durée and tap into a rather static, diffuse kind of vir-
tual Time (in reality the simultaneity of all dynamic, immanent rela-
tions, or the deist God).
The point here is not to belittle Deleuze’s theory, which is a bril-
liantly conceived work of applied philosophy and a useful tool for
thinking about movies. Film is a fluid and temporal medium, and
certainly no theorist today – let alone director – would want to re-
turn to an aesthetic based on still photography or the ironclad type of
montage practiced by Eisenstein. However, I think it is time we real-
ized that the flowing, endlessly open, deist world of postmodern film
effectively described by Deleuze is now being exposed to strategies of
framing, centering, and ordering that are comparable to those found
in theist cosmologies.8 In short, filmmakers are beginning to impose
closed, monistically organized narrative frames on what is by nature
a moving, fluid medium. Rather than being based on abstract or im-
personal part/whole relationships, fictional worlds are now shown to
be set in a world that appears to have been “framed” or formed by a
personal creator, who may appear explicitly or implicitly in the film.
Within this framed world, characters tend to act like personal cre-
ators in their relations with other people. Worlds constructed in this
way become ethical by definition (whether subjects really act ethically
in that world is another matter – deceit is always possible). What is

important, however, is no longer the relation of a part to a whole, but
rather of one discrete, creative subject to another within the greater
frame of the narrative world – a situation that is specifically ethical
and aesthetic in the way used by Kant, and specifically anthropologi-
cal in the way used by Gans.9 Performatism, you could say, seeks to
restore a space where transcendence, goodness, and beauty can be
experienced vicariously, by identifying with fictional ostensive scenes
(inner frames) and with the possibility of transcendence as such (outer
frames). In this kind of “framed” art, we can all appreciate and be
moved by incredible events even if we “know better” – i.e., even if we
know they don’t apply in the practical world.
This ethical imperative regarding other individuals can be made
into a element of plot, even in rather unconventional, violent situa-
tions. In Panic Room, for example, the theist creator of the safe room,
Burnham, played by Forest Whitaker, is driven by a double dose of
resentment. He resents Meg’s having a three-story Manhattan town-
house – the loot from a messy divorce – and he needs the millions
hidden in the panic room to resolve a nasty custody battle of his own.
After successfully getting into the room, however, his respect for the
human object of desire (the child in the custody case, equivalent to
his own) causes him to aid Meg’s daughter, to whom he administers
a badly needed insulin shot. Ultimately, Burnham will shoot the evil,
faceless Raoul to save both mother and daughter; at the end of the
movie, the cornered burglar stands with arms spread, Christ-like, as
22 million dollars in ill-gotten bank deeds flutter away in the wind.
The rather more cynical and complex Cube is less sanguine about
how human nature reacts in a closed, threatening frame. At the end of
the movie, only the resentment-free autist Kazan manages to get out
of the Cube, with all the other characters either falling prey to their
own hubris or to resentful rivalry. The movie suggests that an act of
transcendence – escaping the Cube – can come about only through a
transpersonal mixture of rivalry and cooperation, of intentionality and
disinterestedness. The movie ends by deifying a new, “simple” origin
represented by a cowed, stuttering character who fears the color red –
the color of blood – above all else. And, as in The Celebration and The
Man Who Wasn’t There, the hero stumbles out into a blinding white
light suggesting the infinite openness and sublimity of experience be-
yond the outer work frame. The deification of the subject, though
hardly noticed any more in everyday life, is now being brought to the
fore in narrative arts like the cinema.
The performatist subject, like Goffman’s, is a constructed or
framed one. Unlike Goffman’s facile and highly adaptive social ac-
tor, however, performatist heroes and heroines are, at least at the be-
ginning of their development, locked into a tight “fit” with a single,
set frame. These fits can be more-or-less self-imposed, as in Idiots,
Ghost Dog and American Beauty or, as more usually seems to be the
case, involuntary, as in Amélie, Elling, The Celebration, Being John
Malkovich, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Princess and the War-
rior, Dancer in the Dark, The Cider House Rules, Panic Room, Cube,
or About Schmidt. In these movies it is up to the subject to transcend
the constraining frame in some way, often with the aid of “fortu-
itous” happenings suggesting the handiwork of a theist creator (i.e.,
an omnipotent, but unreliable author intervening at odd times in the
plot). Almost always, the framed subject is forced to become a theist
creator itself, though always in a vulnerable, peculiarly human way.
Conversely, it is possible for theist creators to “fall” into a personal,
vulnerable mode. Panic Room, for one, uses these ironic switches very
effectively to create suspense. At first, the weak, seemingly powerless
mother and daughter reside in the powerful center frame, with the
designer of the safe room helplessly trying to get in; the roles of weak
and strong switch back and forth as the film progresses. As it turns
out, the true objects of identification in the movie aren’t the victims
– the edgy, vengeful Jodie Foster character Meg and her know-it-all
daughter; it’s the theist burglar Burnham, who combines the languid
spirituality of Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog persona with the invol-
untary self-sacrifice carried out by Burnham’s namesake in Ameri-
can Beauty. By the end of the movie, everyone left alive has been
redeemed through the Forest Whitaker character, albeit indirectly.
Meg’s unfaithful husband gets badly beaten up (by Burnham’s un-
wanted accomplice Raoul) while trying to help her, and Meg and her
daughter, seated on a Central Park bench, begin to look for an apart-
ment suited more to their modest living needs than to draining the
bank account of her by now redeemed ex.
In my original formulation of performatism, I suggested that the
prototypical performatist subject is dense or opaque.10 The former
quality must not be taken too literally – performatist characters don’t
necessarily have to be fools or play at being them. Performatist heroes
and heroines are, however, almost invariably opaque, since their initial
identity is the result of a too tight fit between their selves and a prima-
ry frame. Amélie, for example, is at first caught up in an isolated per-
sonal frame caused by her father’s mistaken diagnosis of a dangerous
heart condition. Cissy, the “Princess” in Tykwer’s movie, practically
grows up in the mental institution where her father is incarcerated
and has trouble interacting with men in non-institutional settings.
Homer Wells, of The Cider House Rules, who is reared in an orphan-
age, is a “creation” of the institute’s theistically inclined director, Dr.
Larch, who named him and later trains him as a doctor in his own
mold. Warren Schmidt in About Schmidt is trapped in a web of social
conventions that, at least until the end of the movie, prevent him from
expressing any open, heartfelt emotion. The simple display of tears at
the movie’s end is all the more effective because Jack Nicholson, who
plays Schmidt, transcends his own Hollywood persona by underplay-
ing it at the most crucial moment. Anyone familiar with Nicholson’s
characters from Five Easy Pieces, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or
As Good as It Gets follows the movie expecting either a manic out-
burst or a cynical twist; Nicholson’s contorted facial expressions and
barely contained seething at his own impotence feed this expectation
throughout the film. In the end, though, Nicholson manages to find
an opening in his own screen persona that cannot be reduced to either
of these two extremes: he in effect transcends himself as an actor.
As in Goffman’s frame analysis, the problems inherent in this
“fit” between subject and frame usually become apparent only after
something goes wrong with or within the frame – hence the great
role played by theistically motivated “accidents,” which often have a
liberating effect on the subjects inside. In the case of the Princess,
it is a traffic accident that allows the Warrior to penetrate and liter-
ally breathe life into her by way of a tracheotomy – theist symbolism
doesn’t get much more explicit than this.11 For Amélie it is the death of
Lady Di, which through a series of small coincidences causes Amélie
to step into the role of a bevenolent theist prankster bringing happi-
ness to others. The break can however be brought about willfully.
Homer Wells, for example, leaves the orphanage and Dr. Larch after
a conflict over abortion – an especially drastic and ethically contro-
versial kind of theist intervention. After being faced with an serious
ethical dilemma of his own in the outside world (he carries out an
abortion on behalf of a woman impregnated by her father), Homer
accepts his theist responsibility and returns to take over the role of
the by now deceased Dr. Larch. With credentials faked by the good
doctor, Homer becomes the new director of an institution devoted to
turning out ever more opaque, constructed subjects. You don’t have
to have studied poststructuralist rocket science to figure out that the
whole theist, paternalistic order behind the orphanage is a giant, albeit
benevolent scam. In a typical performatist ploy, the movie affirms this
deceit while at the same time forcing us to identify with its two theist
heroes in spite of our better knowledge. In this way deconstruction is
given its due – and at the same time defused for good. The point is not
to know, but to identify with someone caught up in a frame that will
always be generating intractable ethical problems.
In comedy, there are many ways of playing around with this sort
of opaque character and its theist frame. In Being John Malkovich, the
whole idea of a framed personality is carried ad absurdum by making
John Malkovich himself into a “vessel” that can be entered for fifteen
minutes at a time (at one point the hero and heroine charge 200 dol-
lars a shot for this). The point is not that the characters involved expe-
rience continually unfolding alterity or multifarious shifts in gender,
as poststructuralist philosophy of self proposes. Instead, they enter
into an artificial, opaque mode of being, a frame which allows them to
transcend their own social positions and/or gender in one fell swoop.
Thus Maxine is able to have Lotte’s baby (conceived while the lat-
ter was in John Malkovich), and Craig, a talented but unsuccessful
puppeteer, is able to manipulate John Malkovich while inside him,
using Malkovich’s renown to make himself into the famous puppeteer
Craig always wanted to be. The point is not that Lotte or Craig are
experiencing otherness in an especially extravagant or subversive way;

the point is that otherness can be appropriated by invading the “holy”
– and whole – frame of someone else, in this case the hapless John
Malkovich. You might call this a cynical version of the performatist or
Goffmanian self: being involves role-playing or getting into an opaque
frame in the present, within a certain time frame, and exploiting that
frame to its utmost.
Lotte, Craig and the others who inhabit John Malkovich do not re-
ally experience otherness in the way envisioned by someone like Judith
Butler, i.e., as a belated, constantly unfolding play with bits and pieces
of gender having no natural, preordained configuration. Rather, the
characters get to buy into a whole, though temporary, otherness by be-
ing John Malkovich for fifteen minutes at a time. The grotesque point
of the movie is that people don’t revel in otherness for sheer pleasure
or to escape some hegemonic dictate of society. Instead, they want to
control and inhabit others so that they may live forever as their own
selves. Ideal selfness, in other words, consists in appropriating other-
ness (understood as someone else’s whole frame) for your own ends.
Conversely, as the movie makes clear, you can’t achieve ideal selfness
through oneness with yourself. When John Malkovich finally gets
wind of what is going on and enters his own portal, he is aghast to
find a world in which everyone is John Malkovich and in which “John
Malkovich” is the only word spoken – a nightmarish world of asocial,
redundant self-deification.12
Being John Malkovich brilliantly parodies a basic, insoluble prob-
lem of theism: namely, that as a theist creator, you need someone else
in order to be yourself.13 Fashioning someone in your own likeness in-
evitably involves creating someone weaker than you and dependent on
your own self (it is no accident that the hero is a puppeteer). Converse-
ly, a character striving for deification will also attempt to mold others
in his own image and manipulate them as much as possible according
to his own needs. Much more reconciliatory, on the other hand, is the
movie’s wildly dark suggestion that this kind of manipulation can be
carried out by a collective (at the end, a group of genteel-looking el-
derly people enter the actor and proclaim: “we are John Malkovich!”).
Ultimately, we don’t even mind this sort of appropriation, since John
Malkovich, with his vaguely malevolent persona and his postmodern

ability to slip into any role whatsoever, is the ideal vehicle for it: we
do not mourn the “loss” of a personality that is opaque and infinitely
adaptable to begin with.
Performatist Cinematography
It would be premature at this point to make any sweeping claims

about performatist cinematography. Its most memorable individual
devices – jumpy use of hand-held cameras (the Dogma movies),
black-and-white noir-style photography (The Man Who Wasn’t There),
and rhythmic use of fade-outs (Memento) etc. – are quite familiar in
formal terms and are in themselves not enough to define an epochal
shift. What does seem to hold true for most performatist cinematog-
raphy, however, is a double strategy that is “predicted” by the double
nature of the originary frame. Accordingly, performatist movies can
be said to anthropologize time-space relations on the one hand and
sacralize them on the other.
Just how this works becomes clearer when considered against the
background of Deleuzian, deist cosmology. In the deist tradition ev-
erything in the world takes place on a single, immanent plane: psycho-
mechanically defined impulses of energy on the one side are processed
by psychomechanically defined consciousness on the other. Deleuze,
for example, speaks of cinema as a “spiritual automaton”;14 the brain
is for him “nothing but �...] an interval, a gap between an action and a
reaction.”15 Our consciousness is a material extension of reality and re-
ality a spiritual extension of our consciousness. The two are different
expressions of the same thing, although by definition they are always
somewhat out of sync – you are not what you perceive in the world
and the world’s energy will always have flowed a bit farther down the
line by the time your perception of it gels into a fixed concept. Rather
than running after reality trying to paste cut-out concepts back onto
it, deists try to bring the two disparate types of immanence to meet in
the way they think best fits the metaphysical flux of the world, i.e., in
terms of time and relationality. Because this happy meeting of mind
and world must still take place in the vulgar confines of space, this
is easier said than done. Bergson, for example, rejects film as a me-
chanical deceit because his radical intuitivism rules out any positively
defined semiotic mediation between mind and matter; for similar rea-
sons he is unable to make any coherent statements about aesthetics or
poetic method.
Deleuze, by contrast, is a good deal more flexible on this point, ar-
guing – quite plausibly – that consciousness and world can be thought
of as converging in the medium of film.16 Because Deleuze thinks of
film as either conveying something of the essence of fluid material-
ity (the “movement-image”17) or as the direct apprehension of time
caused by the disruption of coherence and teleology (the “time-im-
age”18), this leads to two basic types of movie, depending on what
kind of image is emphasized. In discussing film’s historical develop-
ment, Deleuze likes to speak of an “action-image” on one hand and
a “crystal-image” on the other. Stripped to its barest essentials, the
action-image can be thought of as a focal point capturing primary hu-
man emotions and the binary conflicts growing out of them; the lat-
ter, in turn, can unfold either in large, epic forms (as an integral) or in
small, ethical ones (as a differential). The action-image and its many
variants form the basis for the practices dominating pre-World War II
narrative cinema. The crystal-image, by contrast, breaks away from
the chronological, motivated representation of affect and conflict in
order to tap into the virtual Whole of the world (Leibniz’s God and
Bergson’s Time). This Whole is an endlessly open Other, the virtual,
constantly unfolding totality of all moving relations. The “crystal-
image” refracts and reflects, plays with sound and sensuality, causes
characters to be “swallowed up” in non-localizable relations.19 Deleuze
relates this convincingly to the techniques of postmodern cinema, be-
ginning with postwar cinema in Italy and the French Nouvelle Vague
of the 1960s. There is no doubt that these concepts lead to very subtle
and productive insights on film, and there is no doubt about their ba-
sic compatibility with postmodern and/or poststructuralist thought.
Unfortunately, Deleuze’s concepts have the same effect on cultural
history as do all other basic strategies of postmodernism: they choke
off any further attempt to describe cultural development above or be-
yond them. If you force the crystal-image still further, you will plunge
even deeper into the depths of postmodernist virtuality; if you fall

back on the action-image, you will be doing little more than ironi-
cally (or naively) citing tried-and-true techniques of pre-war cinema.
As a matter of fact, if you stick with the concept of image as the filmic
and metaphysical nexus between reality and consciousness, you will
be condemned to shuttle back and forth endlessly between part and
whole, as is the case in Deleuze’s deism. The point is not to rework the
concept of image, but to start thinking of cinematography in terms
of a human/theist double frame. There are indications that just such
a change is occurring right now on the practical level in performatist
cinema.
As suggested above, performatist cinema likes to approach the
world in terms of fixed, boxed-in spaces and bought or apportioned
time. This approach is neither a repetition nor a citation of grandpa’s
narrative cinema, nor does it mark a return to the cookie-cutter type
of montage common to the early days of film. Its focal point is once
more the frame, which must be understood as a temporal, spatial or
ethical limit imposed on someone from without. The frame itself
may be thought of as having a theist or sacral dimension on the one
hand and anthropological or human on the other. The theist side of
the frame impinges on, crimps, or temporarily cuts off the continuous
passage from one state of affairs to another in an authoritative way.
Such frames are imposed from above or without and cannot be easily
overcome or placed in doubt. They are, for the most part, onerous giv-
ens that – like theist cosmologies everywhere – subject the characters
within them to severe tests of faith, courage, or perseverance. The flip,
or inner, side of the sacral frames is that their constraining character
sets off an impulse to transcend in the human characters locked up
inside of them. The “bound” characters, in other words, react to their
incarceration by trying to break out of, rework, or somehow overcome
the frames confining them.
The force exerted by the theist frame and the intensity of the hu-
man reactions to it manifest themselves directly in plot and cinemat-
ographic technique. For in film, more so than in any other genre,
we are simultaneously confronted with the impassive, fear-evoking
authority of theist time-space and the emotional pathos of human
time-space trying to overcome it. Perhaps the most effective allegory

of this situation is Cube, in which the unforgiving theist space makes
purely human time – the time before hunger and thirst are going to
incapacitate the seven would-be escapees – into the measure of all
things. Whereas the deist space-time continuum provides consolation
by letting you tap into the infinitely unfolding otherness of the world,
theist space puts the heat on you, challenging you to use your own
time to become like the higher, ineffable will that is bearing down on
you from above.
The Man Who Wasn’t There
One of the most striking examples of how temporal framing works

in the new cinematography is the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who
Wasn’t There. At first, the viewer might be inclined to see the movie as
nothing more than a lengthy, ironic citation – the movie fastidiously
imitates noir conventions both in its camera work and in its depiction
of a criminal case unfolding in a small Californian town of 1949.
Although there are admittedly breaks and discrepancies within the
movie’s period style, they do not interfere with our perception of it as
a whole slice of time. (Real noir films, for example, never mixed sci-
ence fiction and detective plots, as happens here, and the Production
Code would not have allowed a young girl to make a sexually explicit
pass at an older man, as happens between Birdie Abundas and Ed
Crane, the hero. Neither device however represents a break with the
paranoid ambience and sexual forthrightness common to noir.) The
question remains, however, as to just how this slice of time acts upon
us as viewers.
Given the similarities between The Man Who Wasn’t There and
various other films of the Coen Brothers, you could, I suppose, make a
case for the movie being a postmodern critique of 1950-ish American
mores. The society in which Ed Crane lives is founded on politically
incorrect norms clearly tailored to empowering white, male, Anglo-
Saxon heterosexuals. Either you’re a real man, like Big Dave Brewster
(who is killed by Ed), or a “pansy” like Creighton Tolliver (the travel-
ing salesman killed by Big Dave). Sexually mature women like Ed’s
wife Doris are defined by nylons, lace underwear, perfume, and the
like; innocent girls like Birdie Abundas wear bobby sox and v-neck
sweaters. In terms of language the white, Anglo-Saxon culture sets the
tone: Japanese are “Nips,” Germans “heinies,” and Italians “wops”; a
Jewish lawyer and a fat Frenchman of color don’t come off too well
either. These two hegemonic orders – the white Anglo-Saxon one and
the male, heterosexual one – meet ideally in the form of Big Dave
Brewster, a ladies’ man who has made his reputation mowing down
“Japs” in World War II.
As in their previous movies, the Coen brothers expose the gro-
tesque inconsistencies and flagrant rule-bending peculiar to this order.
Big Dave, for example, gladly dons an apron on in order to spend
some time washing dishes with his mistress, Ed’s wife Doris. Doris,
who is herself of impeccable Italian lineage, hates “wops” and tries
to assimilate as much as possible. The teenage girl, Birdie Abundas,
proves to be anything else but innocent. And, as a hired detective later
discovers, Big Dave’s heroism in the war is a fabrication designed to
further his business career.
If the Coens were really only concerned with exposing the falsity
and hypocrisy of 1950s America or exhaustively citing noir norms,
the movie would hardly be very memorable. What in fact makes the
film remarkable is its focus on transcendence and the hero’s – and
our – gradual realization that such a transcendence might be possible
and desirable.
This can be better understood if you think of the whole movie as a
temporal frame. We experience this frame as a homogenous chunk of
concrete time, rather than as the diffuse garbling of virtual time pe-
culiar to postmodernism (as an example of this you could take David
Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which deliberately mixes up styles taken from the
fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties to create a Deleuzian, vaguely
paranoid feeling of a Time existing outside of space and chronology20).
In addition to being homogenous, time in The Man Who Wasn’t There
is also depicted as both historical and obsolete: details like the wear-
ing of fedoras and the use of politically incorrect language mark it as
irrevocably passé. This historicity creates in us a feeling of distance
to the time frame: we, who neither wear fedoras nor verbally abuse
minorities, can easily feel superior to it. This is theist time, which at
first appears well-defined and set: like theist creators or authors we
stand outside of it looking in. At first, theist time would seem to stand
in simple contrast to Ed’s personal or human time, which is measured
by the heads of hair he cuts and the inexorable, step-by-set unfold-
ing of the plot. So far, these two types of time – the authorial and
the personal – are part of standard narrative procedure and not in
themselves noteworthy. What keeps The Man Who Wasn’t There from
being just another remake of a noir “action-image” plot is the way we
(and Ed) are made to reverse our apprehension of the two types of
time. In the course of the movie, our feeling of temporal superiority
to Ed gradually changes to one of identification, whereas Ed’s feeling
of living incrementally gradually becomes more and more expansive
and spiritual, until he disappears completely into the transcendental
whiteness of the screen.
This interplay of theist and anthropological time takes place in
several ways. Originally, Ed’s scheme to blackmail Big Dave in order
to co-finance a dry-cleaning franchise (run by a homosexual traveling
salesman) seems petty and emotionally almost unmotivated – he and
Doris carry on what appears to be a marriage of convenience, and he
isn’t all that perturbed by being two-timed (“I guess, somewhere, that
pinched a little, too”21). Gradually, however, we discover that Ed’s at-
tempts to escape his time frame are motivated by a vaguely felt kind
of spiritual quest. Dry cleaning, which is touted with preacher-like fer-
vor by Creighton Tolliver (“You heard me right, brother, dry cleaning,
– wash without water, no suds, no tumble, no stress on the clothes”
�12]), appears as the first step in a search for ways to achieve a spiritual
cleansing not possible in the cramped social setting of the late 1940s.
Here, our theistic superiority to Ed’s time frame helps provide a mo-
ment of involuntary identification: we know that dry cleaning is not a
scam, just as we know that there is a way out of the 1940s-style mindset
with its wops and pansies. We know, in other words, that we can tran-
scend.22 At the same time, the wall-to-wall noir cinematography causes
us to experience 1940s-style temporality as an inescapable, intuitive
fact. As spectators, we are outside the time frame intellectually but in it
emotionally and visually. This makes it possible for us to take Ed’s last
words before he is executed entirely seriously, as the prophetic expres-

sion of a transcendent longing that may also be our own:
I don’t know where I’m being taken. I don’t know what

waits for me, beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to
go. Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there,
like when a fog blows away…Maybe Doris will be there…And
maybe I can tell her all those things they don’t have words for
here.23
The question posed at the end of the movie is not so much “who
is Ed Crane?” but rather “who are we?” One, quite plausible answer
might be that we are postmodernists. That would mean that we are
stuck in an ironic bind of already always possessing partial knowledge
about the conditions necessary for achieving transcendence but never
quite being able to experience it ourselves. Taking this a step farther,
you might argue that Ed Crane died for nothing. Had he lived to
transcend his own time frame he would have wound up in ours, in
which a premium is placed on ironic reflection rather than on the
search for “things they don’t have words for here.” The movie, how-
ever, anticipates this argument and counters it using a split appeal to
our theist and human ways of identifying with Ed. The crucial scene
takes place in Doris’s cell (based on circumstantial evidence she has
been falsely accused of murdering Big Dave). Her attorney, a cyni-
cal, money-hungry, obviously Jewish lawyer named Freddy Rieden-
schneider, suggests a defense based on his version of the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle:
…They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz something-or-other.

Or is it. Maybe it’s Werner. Anyway, he’s got this theory, you
wanna test something, you know, scientifically – how the plan-
ets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water
comes out of the tap – well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes,
you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can’t know the reality
of what happened, or what would’ve happened if you hadden
a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no ‘what
happened.’ Not in any sense that we can grasp with our puny
minds. Because our minds…our minds get in the way. Looking

at something changes it. They call it the ‘Uncertainty Prin-
ciple.’ Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy’s
on to something.24
From our theist vantage point this sounds like a parody of post-
modern sophistry, as also does Riedenschneider’s later defense of Ed
(“He told them to look not at the facts but at the meaning of the
facts, and then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good
speech, and even had me going...”25). In terms of noir visual devic-
es, Riedenschneider is deliberately cast in a bad light: as he talks, he
moves in and out of sunbeams flooding in starkly from above the cell;
in the moment that he ends his speech he turns away from the light,
his face utterly black and no longer visible. With Riedenschneider,
the Coen brothers use the incarnation of an anti-semitic stereotype
to debunk the notion of posthistoire – i.e., the idea that “there is no
‛what happened.” However, this kind of ad hominem argumentation
remains completely acceptable because we experience it as having been
set in a time frame we have transcended – thus proving that “some-
thing has happened” after all. Placed in the proper theist frame, any
form of ugliness can become ethically good, aesthetically appealing,
and sublime.
The noir cinematography in The Man Who Wasn’t There is quite
obviously a gimmick – an effective, though one-time thing.26 Gim-
mickry of this sort is not absolutely necessary, but it does seem to
crop up frequently as a side-effect of performatist attempts to make
transcendence visible and palpable. The most famous such gimmickry
is, of course, enshrined in the Dogma 95 manifesto. Widely misun-
derstood in postmodern circles as a misguided attempt to return to
authenticity, the Dogma 95 credo is really nothing more than a theist
frame set up so that humans may transcend it or, alternately, so that
theist moviemakers may be humbled by having to assume a crude-
ly human perspective. Lars von Trier’s Idiots takes the latter route:
until the very last scene of the movie, which makes everything fall
into place, you may have felt yourself in the presence of an “idiotic,”
literally unfocused director. In truth, of course, the sloppy camera
work is a – admittedly tiring – gimmick setting you up for a carefully

planned denouement deifying a meek heroine.
The much more artful Celebration, by contrast, uses a break with
the anthropological, hand-held camera perspective to suggest the pos-
sibility of transcendence. In one scene, oddly shot from a bathroom
ceiling, we are suddenly shown a perspective that can only be that of
Christian’s dead sister, whose suicide was the driving force behind
the hero’s decision to confront his father (appropriately, Vinterberg
“broke” the Dogma 95 vow of chastity and used a crane to make
the shot). Gimmicks abound, too, in the other movies mentioned–the
director of Amélie uses digital techniques to show the heroine’s heart
pounding away in her chest when she falls in love, and the people who
climb into the John Malkovich portal view the world through a slit
at the top of the screen that represents his seeing-eye view. Taken to-
gether, these devices do not, of course, an epoch make. However, it is
important to take them seriously as part of the performatist play with
immanence and transcendence, with the theist and the human.
The Russian Ark
The most striking cinematographic feature of Aleksandr Sokurov’s

The Russian Ark is its use of a single, 87-minute long shot made pos-
sible by the use of a body-mounted video camera. As with the Dogma
movies, the point here was not to return to a “simple” or “direct”
perspective – the moviemakers spent more money on digital touch-
ing-up in postproduction than they did on the actual shoot. Instead,
the one-shot sojourn through the Hermitage museum in Petersburg
resulted in a new type of movie that cannot be assimilated to existing
notions of time and montage.
The notion that The Russian Ark might be something entirely new
is, of course, unacceptable to critics still caught up in the poststruc-
turalist mode. The Slavist Dragan Kujundzić, for example, writing in
the internet journal Artmargins,27 does all he can to make Sokurov’s
unbroken long shot sound eccentric, unhuman and technologically
intimidating. Kujundzić speaks of the “unblinking eye” of the video
camera as well as of a spectral “visor effect” associated with an invis-
ible narrator; the camera is said to move in a way that is “not so linear
and sequential, and often wavers in an undecided and aporetic tempo-
ral and spatial opening.” Viewed through a glass darkly, this may all
be true. However, it doesn’t seem to me to grasp the main, dominat-
ing effect of the unified long shot, which is quite simply to make the
camera vision and its movements dreamily anthropomorphic. Tilman
Büttner’s floating, gently panning camera doesn’t have the net effect
of frightening or chilling us. Instead, it acts, relative to cut film, like
the totality of a constructed human gaze. The tone for this is set in
the opening scene, where the camera’s unnaturally wide, indifferently
focused vision is for several minutes rendered almost identical to a
human one by having it pass through a crowded, dark corridor (as
Natascha Drubek-Meyer, writing in the same internet issue, aptly ob-
serves, the scene “emanates warmth and privateness”28). Unless you
really expect the camera to blink and reproduce saccadic eye move-
ments, this is about as close as you can get in mechanical terms to the
human experience of seeing – the catch being that this all depends on
a severely inhibiting frame or mise en scène that cannot be upheld for
all too long. And, indeed, once you have been drawn into the space of
the museum this particular effect recedes. However, as Drubek-Meyer
points out, the anthropomorphic effect continues in other ways. The
complete lack of montage causes the viewer to pay more attention to
the tactile and auditive elements of the mise en scène, which we experi-
ence in the continuously unfolding, uncut presence of real time. This
also explains the occasionally “aporetic” movements of the camera
within the film: the cameraman is pretty much on his own within
his own real time, and the director has no way of belatedly “cutting
back” to a previous position or “cutting forward” to a future one. In
this movie, we are all made to feel the cutting edge of presence – even
as we realize later that it is an epistemological illusion.
It is easier to understand the logic of the long take in The Russian
Ark if you compare it with Dogma cinematography, which may pos-
sibly have influenced it directly. The original Dogma directors – most
notably Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg – used grainy film and
wobbly, hand-held cameras to convey a specifically personal (human)
feeling, even as their movies – Idiots, The Celebration – turn out to
be highly constructed and tightly plotted authorial (theist) constructs

centering on emancipatory acts of self-humiliation. The “amateurish,”
seemingly spontaneous cinematography works in conjunction with a
higher, very constructed artificial plot; both converge in an aesthet-
ic totality not reducible to either of its two parts (poststructuralists
regularly assume that the shaky Dogma cinematography is aimed at
conveying authenticity, which is demonstrably not the case when the
movies are considered as a whole). Sokurov’s protest regarding the pos-
sibility of a prize being awarded to his German cameraman,29 though
disconcerting in terms of its nationalist sentiments, is at least under-
standable from an aesthetic point of view. The long camera shot and
the director’s mise en scène are not meant to be cut apart anywhere, at
any time. (For similar reasons, the Dogma filmmakers’ “Vow of Chas-
tity” stipulates that the director must not be credited – what counts
is the totality of the film, and, at least in theory, not the individual
pretensions of a creative auteur.)
Also helpful for a better understanding of The Russian Ark are the
Dogma group’s “Vows of Chastity” – using only a hand-held camera,
shooting only on location, not using optical work or filters etc. These
are meant to impose a certain sense of humility upon the nearly om-
nipotent director, the intent being to create an equilibrium between
his or her constructive will and the endlessly passive malleability of
the script and mise en scène (the Vows are in fact regularly broken
by the directors, who then “confess” their breaches publicly on the
internet30). Measured against the admittedly rather arbitrary rigor of
the Vows, The Russian Ark can be said overfulfill at least one, namely
No. 3 (to use only a hand-held camera). By welding shot and mise
en scène into an uncut, pristine unity, it achieves something even the
radical dogmatist Lars von Trier never dared. This, however, is where
the similarities end. The act of extreme visual self-limitation (and,
for the cameraman, probably also of self-mortification) is used to re-
cord the contents of an unbelievably lush “arkive” encompassing not
just major works of representational art but also selected, resuscitated
personages plucked from 300 years of Russian history. The Russian
Ark presents the transcendent from a visually very limited, “human”
point of view, while simultaneously ennobling the limited point of
view by using it as a portal to the transcendent. The result is a per-

formative work-frame whose total achievement is irreducible to either
of its parts. Take away the unified shot, for example, and you have a
hard-to-explain montage of unconnected historical scenes; take away
the transcendent historical scenes and you have a boring audio-visual
tour of a very large museum.
Another source for the one-shot movie is Sokurov’s mentor Andrei
Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, who made no bones about his dislike of Soviet
montage theory, suggested that the stylization of time in long shots
should be the central focus of cinema; he expressly regretted that it
was not possible to make a one-shot movie no longer than about 12
minutes (the technical limit at the time he was writing).31 Given this
background it might seem credible to argue that Sokurov simply took
Tarkovsky’s cinematic last wish and fulfilled it using the latest techni-
cal means. A quick visual comparison of Tarkovsky’s own long shots
and The Russian Ark, however, leads to completely opposite results.
Tarkovsky’s long shots are almost always tracking shots or pans; the
excruciating, mechanically controlled slowness with which the cam-
era moves radically distorts and “freezes” our temporal experience of
the mise en scène. In The Russian Ark, of course, this situation is the
exact opposite. The camera in The Russian Ark is dynamic in a spe-
cifically anthropomorphic way – it literally ambles on foot through
the museum. Also, depending on where it is and what it’s aimed at,
it plays with our subjective perception of time (it’s slow when focused
on the paintings and speeds up in the ballroom sequence, when the
camera almost literally begins to dance). In fact, applying Tarkovsky’s
static cinematography to The Russian Ark would have resulted in a
technical and aesthetic fiasco: it would have meant either one long,
devastatingly dreary pan or one long, equally monotonous tracking
shot. Although the original idea for the one-shot movie may well have
come from Tarkovsky, Sokurov’s interpretation of it is very much a
thing of his own making.
This leads into the question as to just what kind of a technical or
aesthetic innovation is really implied by Sokurov’s film. In spite of
the film’s great commercial and critical success, the one-shot movie is
almost certainly going to remain a one-shot affair. The reason lies not
in the technological prerequisites or artistic skill required, but in the

closed performative totality that I noted above. The Russian Ark only
works aesthetically because the immanent long shot has been made
to pass through an even longer transcendent span of time. Sokurov’s
movie is more like a stunt or a gag that you can only pull off once
– rather like Columbus and his famous egg. What is new and what is
meant to endure is not the individual device, but rather the fact of its
performativity per se, whose success or failure is independent of any
epistemological critique. The Russian Ark, in other words, doesn’t need
an epistemological justification for its performance to work; the per-
formance embodies its own goal, which is to jump-start history again,
to create a singular event in the open sea of an otherwise eventless
posthistorical expanse. In epistemological terms, the stunt involved in
The Russian Ark is just as derivative and iterable as is everything else
– but that’s not the point. What counts is the monist, encapsulated
performance, which, strictly speaking, cannot be repeated with any
real effect. In fact, it can only be superseded by another, differently
constructed performance, which in turn forces us to accept or reject
it as it stands. If enough of these successful performances accumu-
late, a new epoch will be formed – a process that I believe is taking
place right now. Deconstructionists may gnash their teeth and wail at
this reversion to what from their point of view is a mindless monism.
However, this is the only way to overcome a posthistorical discourse
which reduces all innovation to epistemological questions of filiation,
iteration, and citation.
There is yet another unpostmodern side to the long shot. The as-
pect of a camera being tied to a specifically human perspective for
almost ninety minutes leads to a cinematographic treatment of time
that is no longer compatible with the Deleuzian (and Bergsonian)
concept of time informing poststructuralist film theory. For if you
think carefully about what the hand-held camera does in The Rus-
sian Ark, you can only conclude that it is the exact opposite of what
Deleuze and Bergson tell us is “good” time or duration. The reader
will recall that Bergson differentiates between psychological time and
duration – psychological time being that tendency to chop up time
into chronological, spatialized segments of presence easily digestible
to the mind. Duration, by contrast, is experienced negatively as the di-

vergence from sequential or chronological time and positively as par-
ticipation in the totality of Time (a time “out of joint” with space and
linear movement32). In film, Deleuze tells us, montage creates the im-
age of time, either synthetically (through the net effect of montage) or
analytically (by allowing us to extract an apprehension of time from
the movement-image in anticipation of the cut).33 Both operations,
however, depend entirely on editing strips of film after the fact.
What happens when you take montage away entirely, as in The
Russian Ark? The answer, I think, is that we get two times: the cam-
era’s (or cameraman’s) time and the time conveyed by the mise en
scène. Both come together in a singular way that does not jive well
with Deleuzian, deist notions about how time works.
The first kind of time, the uncut 87-minute time of the shot, is
Everyman’s time. Taken at face value, it’s the same time you would get
if you were, say, to film your sister’s wedding reception with a cam-
corder in one continuous sequence. The time of the shot is real time,
essentially parallel to the viewer’s time; it is completely chronological
and linear (the line, it is true, meanders, but it is still essentially a
line34). In Bergsonian-Deleuzian terms, this is banal, artless time; it’s
the time you want to get out of by tapping into duration. The second
kind of time, the time of the mise en scène, would at first seem to meet
that urgently felt need. Through characteristic costumes, personages
and language we are confronted with a jumble of historically very
different times in one place, much as one might expect in a properly
postmodern, posthistorical movie. This spatially conveyed experience
of different times (i.e., duration) however suffers in Bergsonian terms
from several major flaws. First, it is highly conceptualized and hierar-
chical (the fact that uniforms, a symbol of rank, help convey this his-
torical information is symptomatic). Secondly, it is highly spatialized
and compartmentalized, much in the way that the Hermitage offers
us rooms with “17th century Flemish masters” and the like. The Berg-
sonian-Deleuzian aesthetic, which places a premium on gradation,
has to cope with what it must feel is a double banality: that of being
stuck in chronological time per se and that of conceptually segmented
space conveying duration. The real reason that the Bergsonian con-
cepts don’t quite hit the mark is that in The Russian Ark we are dealing
with an entirely different, theist or spatially demarcated concept of
time: it’s the time you need to transcend the space confining you (the
time of the shot, the time you’re in the space of the museum, of the
world). This goes for the narrative situation, too. The movie recapitu-
lates the basic theist plot, which plunks people into an inhospitable
environment to see if they can overcome it while remaining spiritually
whole (the basic deist plot, by contrast, is that of the infinite regress
and alienation experienced when you search for Sophia, the durée,
epistemological truths, or what have you not).
The use of theist time in The Russian Ark also creates problems for
Kujundzić, who is intent on assimilating it to Deleuze’s notion of the
time-image. According to Kujundzić, “what the film represents is the
very moment of keeping of a tradition by means of the ‘live’ gaze of
the camera. The live gaze sees an entire epoch obliterated and in ruins.
It is precisely this tension between the utmost visibility and the ruin-
ation of representation that creates the most interesting effects...”35
Unlike many of Kujundzić’s deconstructive moves, which are clever
and instructive, I don’t find this especially convincing or even very
precise. The “live” gaze of the unbroken long shot is quantitatively
and qualitatively much more limited than in a normally cut film with
its richness of quickly shifting times and perspectives. Filmic visibility
isn’t here at its utmost; its about as restricted as you can get. Also, I
fail to see how the representations involved are “ruined” – if anything,
they’ve been made to come alive in the most banal sense of the word.
The movie, after all, magically revives Pushkin, Catherine the Great,
Anastasia, and a whole bevy of Russian aristocrats and places them
in front of the camera for us to see. And, if that isn’t enough, the
museum is also filled with some of the world’s most highly valued
representational paintings, which by all appearances seem to be in
pretty good shape. In some trivial sense, I suppose, you could speak
of a “rupture between the camera and the object of representation,”
as Kujundzić does, but it’s hard to imagine how it would get under
anyone’s skin – after all, the movie can hardly be mistaken for an
authentic attempt to film the contents of the Hermitage or provide
a comprehensive review of post-Petrine Russian history. What does
happen, is that a specifically human, limited apprehension of time

is combined with a specifically theist, transcendent apprehension of
time in such a way that history is not only recorded, but also made.
The film’s own aesthetic demonstrates the possibility of the new not
just discursively, as an epistemological postulate, but also performa-
tively, as an aesthetic fact.
This raises a larger question as to the movie’s basic metaphysical
mindset regarding historical time. Kujundzić, in keeping with the
metaphysical pessimism of postmodernism, argues that the film is
pessimistic, too. At first glance, there seems to be something to this
argument, since at the movie’s end the ark empties and the Russian
aristocracy marches off to its doom. Kujundzić is no doubt justified
in equating this scene (and also a few others) with posthistorical mel-
ancholy and nostalgia for the Petrine period.36 However, this relates
to only one aspect of the Hermitage, which, apart from being a popu-
lar museum, is also a historical location which people have always
passed through anyway. In my mind, its other, more fundamental
function is to transport aesthetically valued sacral representations that
allow us to renew culture after a devastating political deluge. The appeal
of these representations extends not just to people able to “read” them,
as the worldly Custine can, but also to those intuitively captivated by
their aesthetic, visual force, which would appear to be coextensive
with their spiritual one (most of the paintings discussed or focused
on in the movie treat sacral themes). Hence the dialogue between
the French aristocrat Custine and the timid museum visitor admir-
ing Van Dyk’s Virgin with Partridges, in which Custine – unjustly
– complains that the young man can’t understand the painting with-
out knowing the Gospels. The power of these representations is in fact
so fundamental that people don’t even have to see them – hence the
sightless curator who has internalized the Hermitage’s representations
to the point where she can explain them “blind.” As she herself says:
“God protects them �the figures in the painting]. There is no doubt
about His unseen presence.” From off-camera Sokurov’s voice sighs:
“Sir, leave her, she’s an angel.”
Sokurov, it is true, seems to be laying it on pretty thick here. As
secular observers, however, we aren’t obliged to adopt these professions
of faith ourselves. What is more to the point is to realize that the sacral
– the possibility of transcendence – can be experienced best within a
secular, constructed aesthetic frame such as Van Dyk’s painting, the
institution of the Hermitage, or the unified long shot of Sokurov’s
Russian Ark. Indeed, you could say that the real point of such frames is
their specific ability to transcend life-threatening unbelief (the Soviet
era) by preserving higher or sacral value in representational aesthetic
signs in closed settings. The positive set towards these signs as bearers
of future salvation is ultimately more important than their literal reli-
gious content, which is open only to “blind,” dogmatic believers. The
framework enabling belief to be represented in the future, in other
words, is more crucial to culture’s survival than belief itself – or to
knowledge about the conditions of that belief gained ex post facto.
That is why I think that the basic attitude of the movie is aimed to-
wards the future and not towards the past. The Russian ark is not the
Titanic: it swims on instead of sinking.
While I disagree with Kujundzić’s pessimistic and occasionally
downright morbid assessment of the movie, I would like to emphasize
that the movie itself is not a completely consistent example of what I
have identified as the performatist paradigm. One major difference
between The Russian Ark and “classic” performatist movies like The
Celebration, Amélie, Ghost Dog, or Kukushka is that while The Rus-
sian Ark contains a striking, no longer postmodern cinematographic
performance, it lacks an event, a crucial moment of individual re-
demption and identification focused on a whole, usually opaque or
simple person. The central figure of identification in The Russian Ark
is in fact almost from the beginning a double one (Custine and the
voice-over), and Kujundzić is entirely justified in stressing the tensions
between the two; theirs is a dynamic, unstable relationship that gnaws
at the heart of the movie, as well as of Russian culture as a whole. Also,
as Kujundzić aptly puts it, The Russian Ark “leaks”: it stuffs so many
historical allusions into the mise en scène that you can’t but help want-
ing to pursue them further outside the confines of the movie. All this
notwithstanding, though, The Russian Ark is not just immersed in the
past. Rather, through a specific, one-time conflation of shot and mise
en scène, it catapults itself into a no longer posthistorical future.
Memento
One of the most radical exercises in performatist cinematography

can be found in a movie that remains, when viewed as whole, with at
least one foot still firmly planted in postmodernism. This is Chris-
topher Nolan’s Memento (2000), by now something of a cult classic.
The main conceit behind the film is that the hero, Leonard Shelby,
is suffering from a memory disorder caused by a blow to the head re-
ceived while he was trying to defend his wife, who he repeatedly states
was raped and murdered. As a result, Leonard has only a short-term
memory; he can remember his life before the attack, but forgets ev-
erything else after about fifteen minutes. The movie presents his basic
story as a series of twenty-two slightly overlapping temporal frames
or scenes documenting how he tries to seek revenge. To make things
even more complicated, Memento splits up into two times: Leonard’s
stunted, framed time, and chronological time, which, in an act of
theist willfulness, has been set to run backwards. The movie begins
with the end of Leonard’s attempts to find and kill the murderer of
his wife; as it progresses (backwards), frame by overlapping frame, we
learn more and more about how Leonard’s final act of vengeance came
about. The hero experiences a series of framed presences in terms of a
dysfunctional human time, while we experience the accumulation of
these presences in terms of both his time and a theist, authorial one.
In the beginning, these two times are practically identical: in the
first few scenes we are as confused as Leonard is as to what is going
on. This feeling of absolute bewilderment caused by a cruelly limited
frame forces the viewer, at least at first, into a close identification with
the hero – we, too, experience an odd, frantic kind of need to overcome
the frames confining us and to find out what the things around us
mean. Gradually, however, a distinct split in intuitive experience and
knowledge develops. For, as our theist time accumulates, we begin to
realize that Leonard, who knows that he forgets things, has set him-
self up by writing (not very reliable) notes instructing himself what to
do and whom to trust or avoid. The man he kills at the beginning of
the movie, a corrupt cop named Teddy, is by all appearances probably
not the murderer; he’s someone who tried to manipulate Leonard and
whom Leonard decided to make the scapegoat for his wife’s murder.
Leonard, who is stuck in a hellishly limited personal time, becomes
the self-appointed executor of an impersonal vengeance that will al-
ways be seeking new victims or scapegoats. In a way, Leonard is the
prototype of all participants in mimetic rivalry. He embodies a kind
of minimal human consciousness programmed to seek revenge over
and over again – the acts of vengeance being his performances, his
way of transcending what he experiences as one, severely limited time
frame or present.
This view of human consciousness, though limited and pessimistic,
could at least be considered the ground of a primary, monist frame.37
Nolan, however, complicates things still further by adding a second set
of frames to his movie: he intersperses the backtracking color frames
recounting the murder story with backtracking black-and-white
frames in which Leonard recalls a character named Sammy Jankis,
who suffers from the same mental condition as he. Without going into
all the details, it will suffice to say that Sammy kills his diabetic wife
without being aware of it and then falls apart; we seem him sitting in a
mental institution – and for a split second we see in his place Leonard
Shelby. What at first seemed to be a neurophysiological, monist origin
becomes a psychoanalytical, double one. Just as we think we are about
to get the hang of Leonard Shelby’s original motive, we are told that
he is, psychologically speaking, someone else. Whether or not this
basic confusion about who Leonard is makes Memento a better movie
is a matter of some debate.38 Memento, however, remains interesting
as a case study because the dividing line separating postmodernism
from performatism runs right through it. As long as the frame has an
ontological, anthropological ground it is performatist; as soon as the
ground is made into an undecidable double origin the frame becomes
postmodern.
Memento reminds us that we are still in a transition period from
postmodernism to performatism. There are movies that start off with a
seemingly firm performatist premise but then fade back into postmod-
ern murkiness, and there are movies that have a primary, “grounded”
frame but hide it in what at first seems to be an undecidable tangle of
double attributions. As an example of the first type of movie you could
take David Fincher’s Fight Club, whose yuppie, Caspar-Milquetoast

narrator (Edward Norton) teams up with a subversive and willfully
cruel character named Tyler Durden (a slumming Brad Pitt). The
two begin by founding a “fight club” devoted to bloody, bare-handed
fisticuffs; eventually, the Brad Pitt character moves on to organize an
urban prankster group called Project Mayhem (this is one movie that
could not have been made after 9/11 – it ends with two towers of an
unnamed, ostensibly empty financial center collapsing into themselves
after a bomb attack by the Project). The fight club and the prankster-
like terror group are evidently meant to re-empower the raw-knuck-
led kind of masculinity that was repressed for so long by effeminate
postmodern culture (this is the avowed intention of Chuck Palahniuk,
who wrote the book on which the movie is based). Seen in semiotic
terms though, the movie is naive: it would like to take us back to be-
fore the originary scene, to a state of pure, signless mimetic conflict in
which resentment is purged through the application of brute force and
not through signification (one of the rules of the Fight Club, in fact,
is that you’re not allowed to talk about it). As in Memento, the movie
ends by swatting us over the head with a postmodern red herring that
it has been dragging through the plot the whole time: Tyler Durden,
as it turns out, is the narrator’s evil alter ego. Although the narrator
believes he has purged himself of Durden by the movie’s end, the last
frame of the movie suggests that quite the opposite is true – Durden
enjoyed splicing snippets of porno movies into family films to disturb
viewers subliminally, and this is just what we see (though not quite
subliminally) at the movie’s very end. The cruel prankster Durden, in
other words, is still in control of the frame.
By contrast, movies like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and
Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (the Spanish movie on which
Vanilla Sky is based) seem at first to offer us nothing more than a
spectacular off-and-on between two undecidable, highly confusing
perspectives. As Eric Gans has however shown, one perspective in
Mulholland Drive does turn out to be real – it acts as a psychologi-
cal ground for the bizarre phantasy sequence with which the movie
begins.39 Lynch’s movie, though still exuding postmodern paranoia,
turns out to be devoted to a surprisingly unparanoid theme – that of
unrequited love. Open Your Eyes also confronts us with the interplay
of two seemingly undecidable perspectives: it concerns a handsome
young Spaniard and his grotesquely disfigured alter ego, who con-
tinuously, and seemingly senselessly, replace one another as the film
rolls along. Just before the confused hero (and the viewer) are about
to give up in despair, the movie provides a watertight, reconciliatory
explanation. The hero, it seems, has died, but a futuristic society has
developed a process allowing him to dream his own life through again
even in death. The disconcerting appearances of his disfigured self
can be willed away in the next cycle of the dream, which begins with
the hero jumping from a rooftop and landing unscathed below. The
character, in other words, has the power to be both theist and human;
he can frame his own life-after-death in the transcendent reality of
the dream.
I don’t pretend to have described the transition from postmod-
ernism to performatism in film in a comprehensive way. There are
dozens of other contemporary movies that fit the performatist bill,
and there are numerous films that in the early and mid 1990s were al-
ready edging away from the postmodern mode – Eric Gans has noted
this development in several of his internet Chronicles.40 However, I
believe that the broadly drawn borderline of 1997-1999, which in my
view marks the beginning of performatism in film, will hold up to
further scrutiny. The thematic and cinematographic innovations in-
troduced by the films in this period have not only caught on, but are
also being constantly reapplied and renewed. There is little doubt in
my mind that the performatist devices and themes just described will
continue to develop in exciting new ways in the coming few years,
even as the tried-and-true postmodern ones wither and fade. Much
less easy to predict is when film critics and theorists will begin to
jettison their increasingly unworkable poststructuralist concepts and
begin to apply more fitting, monist ones to the new epoch. But that,
of course, is where an already well-developed performatist theory can
lend a helping hand.
Chapter 4
Performatism in Architecture
My interest in architecture after postmodernism began with an

epiphany of sorts. The occasion was a visit to the newly renovated
Reichstag in Berlin in the summer of 1999. Having seen – and been
in – the building sometime in the late 1970s, my expectations were
not especially high. Built at the behest of Wilhelm II, the Reichstag
had never been an appealing edifice. Its massive, pseudo-classical
frame was, if anything, meant to intimidate parliamentary democracy
more than to showcase it, and the interior projected an atmosphere of
gloomy pomp. The new Reichstag, though, turned out to be anything
but an exercise in spike-helmeted imperial nostalgia. The architect
in charge of restoration, Sir Norman Foster, had gutted the build-
ing’s insides in a way that made it spacious and light. Glass partitions
caused the workings of parliament inside the building to become lit-
erally transparent. A huge, shiny aluminum needle seemed to plunge
from above into the parliament’s plenary hall. And, interesting details
for a Slavist like myself abounded: graffiti left by victorious Russian
soldiers in 1945 had been painstakingly preserved in a way usually
reserved for works of high art. The real surprise, though, came in the
building’s transparent, walk-around glass cupola. On that day the sky
was a clear, cloudless blue. Having ascended the gangway that winds
around the cupola and paused at the top observation deck, I suddenly
felt dizzy (I have a mild fear of heights). For a moment, I had the ex-
hilarating feeling of being suspended between heaven and earth.
The more I thought about these unexpected impressions, the more
they started to fit in with the notion of narrative performatism that I
was developing at the time. Foster had neither restored the Reichstag’s
imperial stuffiness nor decked it out with a jumble of posthistorical
citations. Instead, he had carried out an “impossible” architectonic
performance by dematerializing a massive, gloomy building and dis-

solving its cupola into thin air. But just how did this particular stunt
fit in with the larger picture in architecture? A one-year teaching stint
in Berlin three years later gave me the chance to expand my intuitive
impressions into a systematic description.
Berlin, I might add, was not just a venue of convenience. Since
German reunification in 1990, after which it replaced Bonn as the
country’s capital, Berlin has gone through a phase of rebuilding un-
paralleled in any other major city in the world. Practically every im-
portant architect has built there, and both commercial and govern-
ment planners have given them a freer hand than might have been
the case elsewhere. Hence Berlin offers the best and boldest of what is
going on in the world of architecture today. In the following remarks,
using twenty especially striking examples from Berlin, I would like to
propose a definition of performatist architecture.
Transcendent Functionalism and the Spatial Representation

of Ostensivity
Performatism in architecture arises when minimal spatial re-

lations are arranged in such a way as to suggest the possibility of
achieving transcendence. Given the background of modernist ar-
chitecture, in which there has been no lack of minimalist attempts
to stylize or appropriate transcendence, and that of postmodernist
architecture, which ironicizes its predecessor’s program, this implies
several restrictions. Like modernist architecture, performatist archi-
tecture stylizes functionality and tends to use simple forms suggest-
ing a single, monist end. However, unlike modernism, performatist
architecture is aimed at evoking transcendency through devices that
are perceived neither as being motivated by modernist notions of
ideal functionality (whose most obvious token is the grid or square)
nor as displaying an orna mental plurality in the postmodern sense
(citing and mixing received, recognizable codes). Instead, performa-
tist devices call attention to spatially mediated, minimal relations
which seem to overcome certain material or physical limitations.
One might call this transcendent functionalism or, as the case may
Performatism in Architecture 119
be, transcendent ornamentalism. Both variants of the same princi-

ple are opposed to the technical functionalism of modernism and
the ludic orna mentalism of postmodernism. Instead of expressing a
geometrically founded principle in a consistent, foreseeable way, the
performative device suggests the possibility of overcoming some spa-
tial scene with heretofore unrecognized functional means. Since this
functional striving for transcendence is necessarily always incom-
plete, the result is a “useless” architectonic remainder, or ornament
– something that modernism rejects out of hand. At the same time,
this type of ornamentation is not a playful, ironically presented ci-
tation of previously existing styles. Rather, it is the willed, para-
doxical by-product of an architectonic act aimed at showing how
transcendence might be achieved under particular, auspicious con-
ditions. This turn towards stylizing transcendence is not some sort
of mystical escapism, but a logical reaction to the legacies of both
modernism and postmodernism. A brief look at these traditions will
help show why.
Modernism sought to realize the aesthetic qualities of simplic-
ity and unity in architecture by equating these with an essentialist
principle, functionality. The result was a supposedly non-ornamen-
tal, rationally founded “ism” that with time revealed itself to be no
less ornamental and no less metaphysical than any of its predeces-
sor styles. From the postmodern point of view – as acerbically doc-
umented by authors like Charles Jencks or Tom Wolfe – this led
to glaring inconsistencies between theory and practice. Modernist
architects began using the square frame and the glass box indis-
criminately, without regard to their actual functional consequences
– leaky roofs or overheated, giddy office workers. And, the blind
application of grand utopian plans to inner cities led to the creation
of unliveable urban ghettos whose destruction marked the eclipse of
modernism with a bang.
Postmodern architects reacted by uncoupling style from any es-
sentialist claims, resulting in a profusion of wittily cited ornaments
and an ironic, can’t-nail-me-down-to-anything attitude. The result
has been a highly context-sensitive, but also stylistically superficial
architectural vernacular. Postmodernism also places a premium on
knowing. It shows us in an aesthetically and intellectually absolute-

ly convincing way that knowledge of anything involves entering an
endlessly complicated, uncontrollable regress with no origin, no pre-
set goals, and no binding answers. Postmodern buildings embody the
contextualization and dissemination that are also the hallmarks of
postmodern narrative and play with literary genres.
Performatist architecture reacts against both modernism and post-
modernism by returning to an aesthetic of simplicity that is founded
not in functionality or in stylistic citation but in the human – more
specifically, in the semiotically mediated human capacity to believe.
Performatism does this by forcing us to focus in on simple, incred-
ible object relations that seem to transcend the material conditions of
their own existence and that challenge us to accept them whether we
want to or not. It is this specific form of challenge that separates per-
formatism from the postmodern and modern. We already know – just
as the postmodernists and modernists do – that these architectonic
relations are implausible and staged, but that is now beside the point.
For these relations force us to focus our attention on an ostensive act
of transcendence and to identify with that act in a coherent, unified
way. The sum of this implausible architectonic act and the involuntary
identification with it is a performance, a kind of invisible frame around
building and observer that exists, if only for a time, in a state of vi-
brant, unstable unity. As is the case in narrative performatism, this
unity comes about partially through coercion and partially through
pleasure – and, of course, by blocking off the contextual distractions
that are the mainstays of poststructuralism.
Is it possible to evade this unity? As a matter of individual choice,
this is no problem at all. Whoever is content to know these incredible
acts – to “unmask” their obviously staged appeals to belief – can do
so to their heart’s content. However, such viewers will have missed the
point. Although effortlessly maintaining their epistemological superi-
ority vis-à-vis the “naive” performatist work, these critics will remain
entrapped forever in the endless loops of a postmodernist mindset
that no longer has any direct physical correlate in present-day archi-
tecture.
Nine Devices of Performatist Architecture
In the originary ostensive scene, the human arises when two sub-
jects intuitively agree to dematerialize a desired object by replacing it
with a sign. At the same time, the reconciliatory power of the ostensive
act creates an outer frame separating the human from the transcendent
(or, more properly, from the Unknown, to which the reconciliation is
ascribed). Conceived in the simplest terms, performatist architecture
consists of a spatial scene highlighting a spatial relationship that seems
to overcome its own involvement in the material world. This scene, in
turn, creates a palpable, visualized tension between the immanent and
the transcendent or, alternately, between the human (the observer)
and a theist creator (the architect). Based on my perambulations in
Berlin I have identified nine basic devices of performatist architecture,
arranged roughly in order of importance:
1. Theist creation (addition/subtraction of mass)

2. Transparency (dematerialization)
3. Triangulation (destabilization)
4. Kinesis (moving the immovable)
5. Impendency (sublime threat)
6. Wholeness (closure)
7. Framing (dissociation)
8. Ostensivity (centering)
9. Generativity
Here is a brief rundown of each category.
1. Theistic Creation (addition/subtraction of mass)
A striking and very common architectonic device of performatism

is to slice mass out of buildings on a grand scale (less frequently, mass
is added to them in peculiar places). The effect of this slicing or add-
ing is theist rather than ornamental or functional in the postmodernist
or modernist sense. The user or viewer is meant to feel the power-
ful, preterhuman hand of the architect rather than to perceive some
sort of ornamentally familiar form or compelling technical principle.

The addition or subtraction of mass suggests a quasi-divine ability
to giveth and taketh away; the architect presents himself (or herself)
in the manner of a potent, but nonetheless limited manipulator of
matter, as an anthropomorphic divinity who intervenes in the world
below in an goal-directed, forward, but nonetheless ineffable way.1
This may be contrasted with the demiurgical architect of modernism,
whose striving for rationally guided technical perfection is not open to
any sort of self-doubt, or with the gnostic architect of postmodernism,
whose seemingly indifferent combining of unrelated, received styles
creates an ironic metaposition lacking any fixed point of origin. In
general, the performatist act of slicing/adding suggests a decisive, half-
human, half-transcendent act of originary architectonic creation. This
explains why in performatist structures we often see parts of roofs cut
away to reveal the sky. The suggestion is that the architectural object
is mediating some higher, celestial frame – the architectonic sign con-
veying the transcendent message ostentatiously reveals the transcend-
ent through a gaping hole or lack in its own material makeup.2
2. Transparency (dematerialization)
Transparency, which strongly implies the transcendent act of de-

materialization, is another ubiquitous feature of performatist archi-
tecture. Performatist structures constantly evoke the possibility of
transcending materiality by presenting it in the form of transparent,
seemingly dematerialized planes. Postmodernism, by contrast, likes
reflective surfaces because they refer back to a context and away from
an origin, and bright colors, because they evoke secondary semantic
associations not particular to the materials being used. Modernism,
which also employs transparency a great deal, uses it to highlight in-
ternal formal or structural essences. The best known example of this
is Mies’s dictum that a building’s glass skin should reveal its struc-
tural bones.3 Rowe and Slutzky, in their well-known essay,4 suggest
that in modernism there is, in addition to this literal transparency, a
phenomenal one that creates overlapping, ambiguous planes, as in Le
Corbusier’s villa at Garches. Performatist transparency, by contrast, is
demonstrative and tautological. It reifies, albeit imperfectly, the pos-

sibility of transcending materiality per se rather than revealing any-
thing particular about a structure’s inner workings or essence. This
has a certain analogy in the ostensive scene as described by Gans.5
The originary sign at first refers transparently to the thing. Upon see-
ing the thing in this mediated way, however, we discover that it isn’t
the thing itself we desire, but rather, as Gans puts it, the “center of
the scene of representation that the sign brought into existence. The
referent vanishes, to be restored through the renewed mediation of
the sign.”6 Transparent planes or frames that do not reveal a particu-
lar essential content replay this semiotic disappearing act on a grand,
sublime scale. In Gans’s thought, I might add, this dematerialization
also has crucial sacral implications, since it leads to the “discovery” of
God, i.e., the principle missing from the center.
3. Triangulation (destabilization)
A key spatial figure of performatist architectonics is triangulation.

The triangle is a minimal figure embodying the transition from one-
to two-dimensionality (from the horizontal to the vertical). Function-
ally, in the form of the lean-to, it is the earliest form of man-made
shelter. Visually it can be thought of as a figure valorizing the op-
position between divergence and convergence. On the one hand, the
apex of the triangle acts as an index sign pointing to something par-
ticular; on the other, as two lines extending away from the apex, out
into infinity. Triangles also render space dynamic by creating slants
and inclined planes. Modernism, although striving for geometrical
purity and simplicity, traditionally disdains triangular figures, which
it associates with folk loristic gables; it prefers squares or blocks con-
noting infinitely rational functionality (the block acts as the base for
still another block, which is the base for still another block etc.). The
A-frame house, which is planted firmly on the ground, is not yet per-
formatist. From the postmodernist perspective it might be thought of
as citing the primal, triangular lean-to; from the modernist perspec-
tive it carries a structural feature – the gable – to a logical, unifying
conclusion.
Performatism, by contrast, takes triangularity and makes it into

a figure of belief. It tilts triangles and positions them in precarious,
unexpected ways suggesting that their normal function of provid-
ing shelter and stability has been overcome. A secondary device in-
volved in performative triangulation is the use of acute angles. These
“sharpen” the dynamic relationship between the concrete presence
(convergence) and ineffable absence (divergence) that is played out
in the triangular scene. The acute angle, which constricts space
within the building and wastes space without, suggests mathemati-
cally mediated precision and rigor without usually having any real
functional value.7
Finally, triangulation suggests a paradoxical, performative way of
overcoming the semantic opposition between verticality and hori-
zontality that normally helps define all architectural epochs. Uto-
pian modernist architecture, for example, foregrounds verticality
according to the building-block principle noted above. Postmodern
architecture, which is interested in the horizontal relations of con-
text and conditionality, relativizes and sometimes even parodies the
utopian rationality of modernism (when Philip Johnson, for exam-
ple, tops the International Style of his famous A.T.&T. skyscraper
with a piece of bric-a-brac, he effectively brings the high-flying uto-
pian aspirations it cites back down to historical earth).
Performatist architecture, by contrast, revitalizes the upward
motion by casting it as a dynamic, oblique line or plane. Conversely,
this line can also be perceived as a conduit of downward motion (see
also the discussion of kinesis further below). Such a line is neither
ornamental nor functional, but demonstrative and performative. It
draws attention to a symbolic relation located along the axis of the
high and the low. As in the original ostensive scene, we are made to
perceive architectonic space as a paradoxical unity existing prior to
these two semantic opposites. It is also perhaps not entirely coin-
cidental that the triangular constellation is reified in the originary
ostensive scene itself, which cannot be reduced to anything less than
a triadic relation.8
4. Kinesis (moving the immovable)
Kinesis is important to performatist architecture because it is

uniquely suited to reifying transcendence with architectonic means.
This is done by suggesting that a static object – a building – is do-
ing something that it cannot, which is to say move. Usually, this
takes place in the functional context of triangulation. The oblique
side of the triangle suggests that a dynamic, “sliding” relationship
between up and down is being mediated by the building. Modern-
ist architecture, inasmuch as it follows the building-block principle,
tends to promote stasis; postmodern architecture (such as the ear-
ly Frank Gehry house) often suggests movement, but always in a
non-directed way. An intermediate position seems to be occupied by
Gehry’s recent work, as in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the
Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague or the conference room
in the DG Bank in Berlin. These structures, which seem to wriggle
and squirm in all directions without really going anywhere, might
still be thought of as examples of postmodern undecidability. At the
same time, however, their undulating folds and bends may also be
considered unique, amorphous forms evoking the very origin of form
itself.9 Deconstructivist architecture, such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jew-
ish Museum in Berlin, is also very much kinetic. Libeskind, though,
emphasizes dysfunctionality and absence; the fractured, oddly ar-
ranged floor plan of the Jewish Museum is reminiscent of a shattered
Star of David, and the empty inner spaces suggest the void left by the
murder of the European Jews rather than sliced-away matter. In prin-
ciple, at least, the kinetic architecture of performatism would always
have to point out where it wants to move to – hence the importance
of triangulation.
5. Impendency (sublime threat)
A device related to kinesis and theist creation is what I would call

impendency (from impendere, to hang over, threaten). Buildings of
this kind are architectonically so dynamic that they seem to be on
the verge of collapse; they work, as it were, by putting a sublime fear
of the Lord and awe of the architect into the viewer at the same time.
This device, which I have found in several cases in Berlin, has certain
equivalents in modernist architecture, as, for example, in Frank Lloyd
Wright’s elegantly cantilevered Fallingwater House or Mies van der
Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin, whose massive steel-and-concrete
roof seems to float on air. The difference between modernism and
performatism can be defined most simply as the difference between
transcendence mediated by technical rationality and transcendence
mediated by simple, wondrous configurations. In impendent modern-
ist structures like the ones named, we are supposed to be aware that
technical wizardry such as reinforced concrete or high-tension steel is
keeping the precipitously hanging structures in place. In performatist
ones, we are deliberately made to experience how a building seems to
overcome the drama of imminent collapse that it itself is staging for
us. This sublime drama is human, and not technical: it is an expres-
sion of the architect’s will or wilfulness, rather than a demonstration
of technical prowess. Postmodernist, particularly deconstructivist,
buildings also thematize collapse and dysfunctionality. However, they
do this without the metaphysical optimism of performatism, which
plays out the non-rational, faith-based possibility of overcoming ma-
teriality, gravity, or functionality per se.
6. Wholeness (closure)
Wholeness and closure are frequent themes in performatist archi-

tecture, which stylizes them using novel, egg-shaped structures rather
than the geometric, rational circles of modernism. Closure is of course
anathema to postmodernism’s tactics of boundary transgression and
delimiting; modernism tends to favor open spaces and the utopian
unlimitedness implied by them. The notion of closure is, incidentally,
a crucial aspect of the originary scene according to Gans. In his sce-
nario, the protagonists who have just created the first sign must stand
back from it to admire its wholeness and closedness: “the creation of
a formal object in the sign requires that the criteria for formal closure
be imposed by the subject.”10 This ability to impose closure through
semiotic mediation is, in turn, the condition marking the “minimal
structure of human will.”11 Performatism, one could say, revitalizes

this originary moment in an architectonic act.
7. Framing (dissociation)
Intermediate frames are an unreliable, but nonetheless essential

part of the performatist scene. They provide the structure enabling
dynamic acts of transcendence at all to occur but are themselves
necessarily fallible and dependent on an ostensive sign (the “inner
frame”) or on other, extrinsic frames. As is the case in impendency,
performatist architecture often employs frames as tokens of theistic
self-revelation. Frames may bend dynamically at odd angles or have
missing chunks suggesting a paradoxical confluence of architectonic
might and impotence in the face of the Beyond. Very often, the frame
seems to dissociate itself radically from its content (or vice versa).
Postmodernist architecture sometimes highlights frames, but, like
Derrida, isn’t really interested in them as mediators of origin or tran-
scendence. An example of this is the Frank Gehry house, which is an
older building framed by a sort of junky-looking new fence that estab-
lishes a liminal space between the two (for more on this see Jameson’s
discussion of the house in his well-known book on postmodernism12).
The modernist frame, as exemplified by Mies van der Rohe’s Banking
Pavilion in the Toronto-Dominion Center or the National Gallery in
Berlin, creates an autonomous, transparent space for the individual to
regard the world anew through a frame connoting technically medi-
ated rationality.13 The postmodernist frame is a liminal, schizoid one
that creates a relationship of spatial undecidability between the solid
frame and its voided content. Examples of this can be seen in many
buildings of Oswald Mathias Ungers, who likes to cite and stylize the
modernist, structural grid, in effect making what was once an essen-
tialist principle into a superficial ornament.
8. Ostensivity (Centering)
Performatist structures like to point at things for reasons outlined

above in the discussion of triangulation; sometimes they also like
to center them and point at them. I have found a few odd examples
of this, although it seems a minor, hard-to-implement device. Post-
modernism, obviously, eschews all centrification; modernism centers
things by way of symmetrical arrangement but does not point at them
(modernism does not allow the suggestion of any sort of higher ration-
ality external to its own principles).
9. Generativity
In at least one instance, I have found a building, Mathias Os-

wald Ungers’ Family Court in Berlin, that plays with a single form (a
square) in a kinetic, three-dimensional performance suggesting that
other forms are being generated out of it in a dynamic, open-ended
way. This mixture of rational, radical monism and ludic generativity
suggests a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. Modernism
is rigidly monist but doesn’t play; postmodernism hates monism but
likes to play. Representing generativity in architecture directly is in
any case a very ambitious, aesthetically risky move that will probably
be limited to a small number of structures.
Performatist Architecture in Berlin
Before I start my visual stroll through Berlin, the reader should

be aware that I will be treating these buildings in terms of their
place in the performatist code rather than in regard to their urban
context, the oeuvre of their planners, and their success or failure as
functional and aesthetic objects, i.e., the usual subjects of architec-
tural criticism. Those familiar with German and curious about these
and other topics of local concern might want to consult Falk Jaeger’s
well-informed and richly illustrated Architektur für das neue Jahr-
tausend �Architecture for the new millennium],14 which provides the
most up-to-date critical overview of the architectural scene in Berlin
of the 1990s.
The Estrel Hotel (triangulation, framing, impendency,

theist creation)
The Estrel Hotel (figure 1.) is performatism at its most exuber-

ant. The hotel’s main structure is a gigantic wedge whose apex points
down toward a specific spot on earth (you, the observer) while its open
angles stretch upwards and outwards toward the infinite bounds of
the sky. The upwardly directed push from solid, gleaming mass to
nothingness is accentuated by an empty frame above extending the
wedge structure below. The sky itself then fills out the emptied earthly
construct – a common performatist device suggesting a transcend-
ent goal. The most striking feature of the building is the enormous
wopperjawed wedge resting on the inclined plane of the building’s
forefront. You could think of it as an impendent threat (the proverbial
ton of bricks about to slide down onto your head) or as a load on a
ramp miraculously defying the laws of gravity. The theist implications
are here, I think, self-evident. As Falk Jaeger writes, “you can almost
imagine how the architects took a knife and carved the form out of
a block of clay.”15 Viewed from the side (not visible in the picture),
the Estrel also suggests the intent of a theistically inspired creator to
overcome materiality. A large chunk has been carved out of the fore
Figure 1. The Estrel Hotel

and aft parts of the building, which are linked only by a catwalk; the
jaggedly running juxtaposition of glass (above) and stone (below)
along the building suggests a wilful, if uneven, transition from solid
earth to immaterial sky.
The Kant Triangle (kinesis, triangulation, impendency)
Figure 2. The Kant Triangle

The Kant Triangle (figure 2.), located prominently next to the

Bahnhof Zoo train station, is not especially performatist in terms of
its basic ornamentation. Indeed, the reflective glass surface on the
side, the juxtaposition of quadratic and circular figures as well as the
ornamental struts are all typical features of postmodernism. What
makes the building extravagantly performatistic is the fact that it re-
ally and truly moves. The triangular gizmo on top is a kind of gigantic
weather vane or sail that actually shifts when the wind gets strong
enough (initially unaware of this fact, I made a mental note to stay
clear of the thing when the first big gust of wind came along). The
oversized weather vane does have a function of sorts – it can be used
to clean the building – but there are probably easier and less ostenta-
tious ways to go about doing this. With this kind of building, the
context is secondary. Your attention is centered on the giant triangle,
which, depending on the way the wind is blowing, decenters itself
again by pointing outward towards something in the scene around it.
This is a good working example of transcendent functionalism. The
“function” of the vane is to attract attention to itself so that it can
refocus that attention elsewhere once again; the agency guiding that
function (the wind) is part of a bigger, natural, ineffable frame that
transcends us all while at the same time leaving a spatial, terrestrial
marker incontrovertibly demonstrating the immanent existence of a
higher principle.
Neues Kranzler Eck Shopping Mall, Kurfürstendamm (triangula-

tion, transparency, framing, kinesis, theist creation)
Also centrally located near, and visible from, Bahnhof Zoo. The
extreme acute angle of the transparent, triangulated facade “wastes”
space in an extravagant, visible way incompatible with any quotidian
function (figure 3). Paradoxically, this grand display of ornamental ex-
cess is derived from the Euclidian axiom that two non-parallel planes
in space must converge. The true function of this rationally motivated
ornamentation would indeed appear to be to direct the observer’s gaze
upwards in the most radical possible way (figure 4). As in many other
structures, the half-built transparent roofing and the
incomplete frames (figure 5.) suggest that the heavens above are the
real, ultimate roof of the work of art (designed either by a theist, per-
sonal God interested in building a shopping mall, or a theist, incom-
pletely omnipotent architect, in this case Helmut Jahn).
Figure 3. Neues Kranzler Eck



Peek and Cloppenburg Department Store, Kurfürstendamm (fram-

ing, kinesis, transparency, triangulation)
The transparent mass of this department store on the Kudamm

(figure 6.) appears to be flowing out from under its massive, upwardly
thrusting frame. This dramatic dissociation of frame and content
thematizes the possibility of overcoming an originary relation, which
here takes on the semantic attributes of solid vs. liquid (in functional
terms, the transparent shield keeps water off passers-by and prospec-
tive customers while at the same time mimicking the attributes of
what it is protecting them from). In terms of gender, the transparent,
flowing skirt might be thought of as a graceful female counterpoint
to the masculine, muscular frame: Peek & Cloppenburg, after all,
clothes both men and women.
Figure 6. Peek and Cloppenburg

The Baden-Württemberg Office, Tiergartenstraße (theist creation,

triangulation)
A wilful, theist architect (Dietrich Bangert) has gutted the build-

ing, but in a goal-directed, elegant way made clear by triangulation
(figure 7). The horizon lines leading into the building serve to draw
us involuntarily into its space, even as we are taken aback by the dras-
tic, non-functional removal of so much matter from a rectilinear vol-
ume. Further rectangular incisions in the triangular incision heighten
this effect even more.
Figure 7. Baden-Württemberg Office

The British Embassy, Wilhelmstraße (theist creation, triangulation,

framing)
Because of its bright, arbitrarily selected colors and playful shapes

the British Embassy (figure 8.) near the Pariser Platz might superfi-
cially seem postmodern. Once more, however, a theist gesture of “I
taketh away and I giveth” informs the buildings character more than
anything else. In general, it looks as if the architect, Michael Wilford,
first eviscerated the building and then placed an enormous triangu-
lar form in it pointing back directly out to YOU. The odd feeling of
being drawn into the building and at the same time repulsed by it is
Figure 8. British Embassy
strengthened by the absence of window frames allowing you to find

your bearings – the horizon lines recede in such an acute way that
you have the impression of no connection between facade and what is
behind it (once more a case of a frame dissociated from its content).
The total effect is more than a bit unsettling. The building is massive
and yet vulnerable, attractive and yet repelling. This paradox is origi-
nary and performative rather than cited or semantic. There is no set
of previous codes I am aware of that could help us figure out what the
building is doing to us.
Indian Embassy, Tiergartenstraße (theist creation, centering)
One of a spate of new foreign embassies in Berlin trying to outdo

one another in architectural brilliance (figure 9). It was designed, it
would seem, by theistically inspired architects (Léon and Wernik) us-
ing a large round cookie cutter.
Figure 9. Indian Embassy

The DG Bank, Pariser Platz (framing, transparency, triangulation,

theist creation)
The usual line on the DG Bank (figure 10.) is that an overly re-
strictive building code for the area around the Brandenburg Gate
caused Frank Gehry to design a run-of-the-mill facade, while the real
focal point of the building is the bizarre “Horse’s Head” conference
room tucked away inside. In performatist terms, however, I find that
the facade, in its own way, is no less remarkable or complex than the
Bilbao museum or any of Gehry’s other crumply, amorphous metallic
structures. The massive, cut-off columns, which simultaneously frame
oversize, movable windows, suggest a powerful upward surge which
is paradoxically intensified by being chopped off at the top (that’s the
theist architect at work again) and by the triangular incline of the
transparent window-become-balcony (which suggests overcoming the
need for a horizontal frame). The building as a whole is dramatic
juxtaposition of upwardly bound, self-transcending transparency and
crude, earthbound materiality. On the one hand, Gehry creates a mas-
sive, uncompromising frame; on the other, he tries to get rid of it in a
series of incompletely realized, irregular, staggered steps (note how the
balconies on the second floor create a slightly protruding step or plane
setting up the massive, dramatic removal of volume further above) .
Figure 10. DG Bank

The Paul Löbe Government Office Building, Regierungsviertel

(transparency, impendency, theist creation, framing)
Lying between the Federal Chancellery and the Reichstag, the Paul
Löbe Building (figure 11.) has the thankless task of linking the massive,
brooding Reichstag and the swirling, effervescent Federal Chancellery.
Be that as it may, it is still a textbook example of performatist technique.
The large chunks cut out of the roof make a transcendent, ineffable
frame – the sky – an intrinsic part of the entire architectural statement.
This is a common, but very effective performatist device. The spindly
pillars of the roof (figure 12.) look as if they could be knocked over
with one swift kick (in the aftermath of September 11th, one wonders
if the architect, Stephan Braunfels, has had any second thoughts about
this impendent feature). The large cuts made in the side of the building
are huge theist incisions supposed to make it possible for passers by to
observe, at least superficially, just what their elected representatives are
up to. After decades of postmodern distrust of visual evidence, perfor-
matism – as exemplified in Gans’s notion of the ostensive – suggests that
truth can be made present and visible in terms of a specifically framed,
artificial scene, even as this scene is always open to resentment over
what it cannot depict (in this case the abstract or cognitive aspects of
Figure 11. Paul Löbe Building

lawmaking). You don’t have to be a hard-boiled cynic to “see through”

this particular device, but I think it should be understood together with
the total theist message, which implies that the Federal Representatives
are also beholden to a higher context of undisclosed origin (German
cabinet members have the option of taking the oath of office either with
reference to God or without).
Figure 12. Paul Löbe Building

The Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz (kinesis, transparency, centering,

theistic creation, triangulation)
Designed by Helmut Jahn, the megalomaniac German-Amer-

ican architect that critics love to hate, and owned by a multina-
tional entertainment moloch, the Sony Center (figure 13.) is nei-
ther gemütlich (exuding emotional warmth) nor volkstümlich (of the
people). It seems to attract visitors not because of any innate charm
but because several large cinemas were cleverly located in or near it.
Nonetheless, the Sony Center and the surrounding buildings (also
designed by Jahn) are all impressive examples of performatist spa-
tialization. The roof, for example, suggests a giant whirligig about
to take off on its own in defiance of all notions of functionality or
common sense; the odd structure in the middle, by contrast, points
dramatically downwards to a center point. Indeed, it looks as if a
giant dart had just plunged in the Center’s roof, dramatically ex-
emplifying the old Sony Playstation motto “It’s not a game.” The
typical incompleteness of the roof makes the firmament – and even
the megalomaniac architect’s ultimate inadequacy before it – a part
of the total aesthetic statement. Another oddity is the enigmatic,
trestle-like frame planted on the building’s roof (figure 14). As in
many other performatist structures, it seems to transcend both or-
namentation and functionality by combining both in a paradoxical
way resisting any earthly explanation. Normally, the trestle is found
in that epitome of functional ugliness, the train bridge. Planted on
the top of a building like this, the trestle becomes an ornament con-
noting an out-of-place, as yet unachieved functionality that would
presumably require us to transcend everything we have known up
to now about buildings and train bridges. Unlike postmodernist or-
namentation and citation, which is clever and smoothly ironic, this
suggests the work of a powerful, yet not perfectly omnipotent hand
(that of a theist God or of the architect mimicking Him).
The notion of theist creation also applies to the neighboring Deut-
sche Bahn Building, which looks as if Jahn took a very large hatchet
and chopped it in half (figure 15). Depending on your perspective,
it could be either a sign of tremendous power or a bow to something
higher, a sublime subtraction of mass demonstrating that less can also

be infinitely more.
Figure 13. Sony Center

Figure 14. Sony Center

Figure 15. Deutsche Bahn Building

Price Waterhouse Coopers Building, Potsdamer Platz (triangulation,

transparency)
This striking Renzo Piano building realizes triangulation and tran-

sparency in the extreme (figure 16). Note that the transparent facade
of this skyscraper doesn’t really reveal any skeletal frame à la Mies.
Instead, it accentuates the non-functional, but logically realized acute-
ness of the triangular frame. This is a typical performatist paradox
with a transcendency-seeking resolution. The acute, geometrically
rigorous frame thrusting itself out of the building’s functional body
embodies both ornamentation and functionalism while transcending
them both: it is a geometrically defined, rationally conceived, useless
ornament whose function is to point upwards and outwards towards
an unidentifiable, higher source. If you reverse this function – if you
think of yourself being sucked into the space cut out by the building
– you are drawn into a newly built, popular shopping district.
Figure 16. Price Waterhouse Coopers Building

The Treptow Crematorium, Baumgartenstraße (all nine performatist

devices)
If you ever have the misfortune to die and be cremated in Berlin,

your friends and family will have the good fortune to mourn your
passing in this building. Many people think that this is one of the
most important and beautiful structures erected in Berlin in the last
ten years; indeed, the interest in the Crematorium as an aesthetic ob-
ject is so great that its administrators have had to hire a private com-
pany to conduct tours during cemetery off-hours.
Of all the buildings treated here, the Crematorium is the only
one that actually fulfils a sacral function, albeit it one on the fringe
of Church dogma (cremation is a pagan, rather than a Christian rite
and has become popular in recent years because it is cheaper than
a regular full burial). This sacral context, which makes the set to
transcendency visible to even the most hidebound cynic, is however
not a necessary condition of performatism. Indeed, the architects,
Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, used almost identical devices in
two completely secular buildings (the Federal Chancellery in Berlin,
see below, and the Art Museum in Bonn). This more or less self-
contained sacral aesthetic (or aesthetic sacrality) is more important
than the context-sensitivity typical of postmodernism. Ideally, the
performatist leap to the transcendent can take place anywhere, under
any conditions.
The Crematorium is a veritable encyclopedia of performatist de-
vices. By all appearances the theist creator seems to have carved it out
of a single block (in reality the building is made of plain old poured
concrete; figure 17). Slices in the roof (figure 18.) suggest a rationally
planned passage to heaven as well as the ease with which even the most
solid-seeming material can be made to evanesce. Dematerialization is
also suggested by the transparent walls; you can literally see through
the entire building. Very effective is also the kinetic manipulation of
the façade (figure 18.); its louvers make matter appear and disappear
upon command. The ornamental, absolutely superfluous triangulation
defining the three ominous smokestacks (figure 19.) suggests upward,
transcendent expansiveness while pointing downward, as it were, at
thee. Not visible in the picture is the incision made in the earth, into
which the theist creator has, as it were, laid the Crematorium itself
(the actual cremating, which is done by a computer-guided mecha-
nism, takes place underground). Inside, the twenty-nine light-tipped
columns arouse universal wonder (figure 20). The columns, which
seem to stand around helplessly, like real-life mourners, actually sup-
port the roof; the functional brackets at their tips are however made
invisible by the light streaming in from on high. It is hardly necessary
to comment on how they simultaneously transcend functionality, ma-
teriality, and “mere” ornamentation.
An at first curious, but on second thought absolutely characteristic
feature is the egg suspended from a barely visible wire hung from the
ceiling above a round pool (figure 21). Here, Schultes and Frank are
evidently citing pagan symbols of originary unity.16 The mourner will
have no trouble deciding what is more important: the performative,
magical representation of that unity or the derivative, ironic fact of its
citation. Also striking are the curiously tiered walls of the Crematori-
um with their regular rows of holes and casket-like incisions with sand
piles at their base. The holes contain lights which, when lit, perfor-
matively suggest the dispersion of matter from within; the sand piles
suggest the dissolution of matter into dust. These and other devices
Figure 17.
used in the Crematorium are suggestive of non-Christian sacral struc-

tures (the Temple of Karnak, the Great Mosque in Cordoba, Stone-
henge etc.) without, as far as I can tell, really citing them directly.
The point is not to quote but to create what Schultes calls “suggestive
spatiality”17 or, as he also once put it, “a new, primeval convention, an
architectonic imperative.”18
Figure 18.
Figure 19.
Figure 20.
Figure 21.
The Federal Chancellery, Regierungsviertel (transparency, kinesis)
Dubbed the “Chancellor’s Washing Machine” by the general pub-

lic, this swirling, grandiose structure (figure 22), which is the seat of
executive power in Germany as well as the Chancellor’s home, has
been accused of being gigantomanic and excessively garish.19 Like the
Reichstag, the Presidential Chancellery, and the Paul Löbe Building
it makes an important positive statement about political culture in
today’s Germany. In each case, the decision-making bodies involved
could have opted for staid, emotionless structures suggesting stabil-
ity, bureaucratic efficiency, and consensual continuity – the reassur-
ing hallmarks of postwar German politics. Instead, the vacuum that
resulted after German reunification was taken as a chance to fit out
Germany with an architectonic face beholden to no particular previ-
ous historical style and conveying open, uplifting qualities. This is
most certainly one case where the fall of communism has had a direct
aesthetic expression: the building definitely makes a post-millennial
statement in Gans’s sense.20
The Chancellery itself is a good deal larger than my picture sug-
gests. It is flanked by two massive office blocks, and from the distance
its boxy exterior does indeed resemble a giant, outlandish household
appliance (the popular idea of the building as a gargantuan washing
machine fits in well with my notion of transcendent functionalism).
The facade, which is the most striking and widely photographed fea-
ture, works by radically disassociating frame and content in both
vertical and horizontal space. As in the Treptower Crematorium, it is
possible to see through the vast building entirely; the structure seeks
in this way to disavow its own materiality. Wings have been sliced
into the roof suggesting both flight and the overcoming of matter;
the flight theme is echoed further below by the pterodactyl-like roof
stretched out over the entrance. The profusion of chopped-off pillars
suggests theist wilfulness mitigated by natural growth (the trees on
top). On the horizontal level, the first floor appears to be dissociated
entirely from the ground floor; similarly, the louvers behind the pillars
dissect and “move” space performatively. On the ground, the oddly
configured grass strips repeat the wing patterns above and point us
toward the entrance. In general, the building “opens” out towards us

and tries to draw us into its space, which is then made to dematerial-
ize as much as possible. This effect of openness, transparency, and
upwardly bound movement is entirely conscious and political. Schul-
tes wanted to make this German equivalent of the American White
House as open to the public view as possible, and was bitterly disap-
pointed that a Citizen’s Information Center he designed was not built
in front of the Chancellery.21
Figure 22. Federal Chancellery
The Presidential Chancellery, Tiergarten (wholeness)
Designed by upstart architects Martin Gruber and Helmut Kleine-

Kraneburg, the Chancellery is a shiny anthracite hatbox (figure 23.)
that connotes wholeness while at the same time managing to integrate
its natural surroundings into itself visually. The building reflects, but
in a humane, inclusive way, and not in the cool, metallic-sunglass-
style typical of postmodernism: black and white, nature and culture
merge amicably on its receding, self-effacing surface.
Figure 23. Presidential Chancellery
The Lemon Office Building (closure + triangulation, impendency,

transparency, theist creation)
Figuratively speaking, this is performatism’s way of squaring the

circle (figure 24). Triangulation, which normally involves stylizing
convergence and divergence, is combined here in a paradoxical way
with circularity and wholeness. Seen from the road, the Lemon Build-
ing seems to float over its base, which is marked by crisp incisions
that seemingly undermine its wholeness and stability – all the work
of architects (Léon and Wohlhage) not quite of this world. In this
structure, the occupants of the building unwittingly participate in the
performatist plan: undrawn, the window shades realize transparency;
drawn, materialization. This spontaneous individual activity of the
building’s users – something modernist architects disdained as a gross
disruption of their rigorous symmetries – is now integrated into the
total aesthetic scheme.
Figure 24. Lemon Office Building
GSW Tower, Kochstraße (transparency, kinesis, framing)
The sail-like structure on top of this building (figure 25.) as well

as the peculiar transparent facade work together to create a chimney-
like draft that cools the building (designed by Matthias Sauerbruch
and Louise Hutton). This demonstrates that performatist devices
need not be non-functional in reality – they just have to look that
way. In this case there is also still a certain overlap between post-
modern and performatist visual language. The sail on top can be
said to cite 1950s-style buildings22 and the red-pink-orange color
of the awnings is no doubt still a frivolous, postmodern touch. No
longer postmodern, however, is the way in which they interact with
the transparent frame to suggest dematerialization. The awnings,
whose number and arrangement is constantly changing as their users
pull them up and down, put on a striking, spontaneous performance
while suggesting that material things are being suspended in thin air.
The frame itself appears entirely dissociated from its content, which
is yet another frame.
Figure 25. GSW Tower
The Family Court, Kreuzberg (framing, generativity)
This building by the quadrant-loving German architect Mathias

Oswald Ungers still has ties to the postmodern aesthetic. It cites a
presumably functional unit, the square or grid, and treats it as a su-
perficial ornament rather than as the external expression of an inner
functional principle (figure 26). Here, though, it seems to me that
Ungers transcends postmodernism by using the square as a generative
unit that unfolds in a dynamic second dimension (on the building’s
facade) and in a third dimension (the empty frame beside it, figure
27). In both instances the square is more than a mere ornament or a
simple bearer of functionality. On the two-dimensional plane the ki-
netically ever expanding squares demonstrate generativity (if observed
from the top right to the bottom left) or, in a way more natural to
the eye, reduction to originary unity (if observed from the bottom
left to the top right). The disassociation of frame and content that
we have observed elsewhere is realized in an especially radical way off
to the left. The frame’s contents seem to have taken off for parts un-
known, leaving the functional structure behind as a useless ornament
Figure 26. Courthouse
reminding us of a just transpired transcendent event. Ungers, whose

manifesto “Towards a New Architecture” (1960) was a harbinger of
postmodernism, has more recently expressed himself in ways sugges-
tive of performatism and originary aesthetics. In remarks about his
Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe he notes that the building be designed
it supposed to “look as if it had always been there from the very begin-
ning.”23 In emphasizing the “uniqueness” �Einmaligkeit] of the build-
ing, Ungers rejects the notion of following an “eclectic principle.”
Rather, he “decomposes” aspects of other structures to form timeless
architectonic invariants striving for perfection. His technique consists
of “a play of formal elements which remain the same independently

of historical development and which are employed in varied form
and in the most varied epochs in different works of architecture.”24
This “iconographic principle,” as Ungers calls it, resembles the sacral
practice of icon painting: “Just as the icon is the original image �Ur-
bild] and in the course of time is perfected ever more, so too does the
process of assimilation consist not just in banal imitation, but also in
ever new interpretations of what are essentially the same architectonic
elements.”25 His plan for the Library is thus “not just the extension of
an already existing architectonic concept, but also its continuation in
the sense of a search for perfection.”26
Figure 27. Courthouse

The Jewish Museum, Berlin Mitte (kinesis, theist neglect, incomplete

triangulation)
Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (figure 28.) is a deconstructiv-

ist, late-postmodern structure that however shares numerous devices
with performatism (just as deconstruction itself shares certain theo-
retical positions with Gans’s generative anthropology and performa-
tism). One of the most striking differences between deconstructive
and performatist architecture is the former’s metaphysical pessimism.
Although manifestly theist – it stylizes an act of originary creation/de-
struction rather than citing previous styles – the Jewish Museum sug-
gests the wilful neglect of a theist God: the cuts in the building look
like an evil Other has slashed the building with a giant razor (fig. 29).
Generally speaking, triangulation is either lacking (forms are simply
oblique) or is incomplete, as in the cuts on the facade. The slant-
ing, squat steles topped by greenery are more suggestive of gravestones
than of structural devices; together with the rest of the building they
suggest a world gone awry but slowly trying to set itself right again.
Figure 28. Jewish Museum

Figure 29. Jewish Museum

Chapter 5
Performatism in Theory: The New Monism
When I first began charting the course of post-postmodernism in

the late 1990s, I assumed I would be setting out on already well-trod-
den paths. Academic criticism, after all, is an extremely competitive,
specia lized field, and it seemed unlikely that legions of highly trained
scholars would have failed to notice the widening gap between the
classic descriptions of postmodernism and actual cultural practice.
Judging by name, at least, a basic shift in thinking was already taking
hold in academia. At the University of Konstanz, where I was teaching
at the time, a large research project in the humanities had been titled
“Literature and Anthropology” – signaling a rather unpostmodern
shift of interest to the human. Colleagues everywhere were grumbling
openly about the treadmill-like state of poststructuralist theorizing.
And, books with promising titles like Life After Postmodernism1 sug-
gested that someone out there was seriously considering that there
might be an “after” after all. Given all these signs of disaffection, I was
sure that I would be stepping into a vibrant, already well-established
discussion.
I was wrong.
As it turned out, the mechanisms that made postmodernism into
one of the most theory-saturated literary epochs ever also prevented its
norms from being exposed to any sort of historical self-critique. One
of the main culprits, I quickly discovered, was the split, belated con-
cept of sign running through all of postmodern thought. Although
colleagues in all disciplines were perfectly ready and willing to discuss
terms like “the human,” “monism,” or even “performatism,” the result
was invariably the same. The provocative otherness of the concept in
question was quickly assimilated back to whatever poststructuralist
paradigm my interlocutor happened to favor. While expressing vague
acquiescence with the notion that postmodernism wasn’t quite what
it used to be, no one was willing to abandon the seemingly inexhaust-

ible possibilities of signifying-after-the-fact in favor of a concept of
sign that proposed to plunk maudlin-sounding topics like belief, love,
presence, and beauty in the center of critical discourse.
In literary criticism and cultural studies the situation turned out
to be rather the same. A quick look at Life After Postmodernism con-
firmed that it looked pretty much like life during postmodernism –
full of theoretically refined, but resolutely posthistorical positions.
And, a survey of the major critical journals – even the ones nominally
devoted to literary history – revealed a complete lack of interest in
formally describing or naming the post-postmodern epoch.
As I’ve already recounted in my introductory remarks to this
book, my search for a historically oriented monist theory quickly nar-
rowed down to Eric Gans’s concept of generative anthropology and
its notion of the ostensive (and, later, post-millennialism). Gans’s
monism, however, does not stand alone. Although generative anthro-
pology remains the most user-friendly and productive theory of its
kind, there are a number of other monist concepts that have succeeded
– with varying degrees of success – in freeing themselves from the
endless regress and epistemological fence-straddling common to post-
structuralist discourse. The following survey is intended to give a brief
overview of some current monist theories and consider their useful-
ness for describing the shift to a performatist culture.
My short foray into the new monism starts in a kind of semio-
sphere reserved for two theories that are monist in design but lack cer-
tain crucial features that would enable them to leave the gravitational
field of posthistorical discourse. As a result, they continue to orbit
endlessly around the very kind of postmodern paradoxes that their
authors intrepidly set out to overcome.
Pragmatic Performatism: “Against Theory”
In America, the most widely discussed monist concept up to

now has been Steven Knapp’s and Walter Benn Michaels’ campaign
“against theory,” which was launched in the early 1980s.2 Viewed
in performatist terms, Knapp and Michaels place author, sign, and
Performatism in Theory: The New Monism 163
recipient within the bounds of a single frame. Signs only mean things
because human subjects intend them so for other people; interpret-
ations by those other people, for their part, can only seek to recon-
struct those intentions through the signs provided by the work. All
three elements meet in a unified performance that cannot be reduced
to any one of its parts. Attempts to isolate and favor any one part of
this unity – be it the mark or trace after the fact (poststructuralism)
or the author before the fact (hermeneutics) lead to logical absurdities
in the way interpretation is defined and practiced. For example, by
radically separating human intention from the sign, poststructuralists
like Paul de Man wind up positing the existence of signifiers that
“mean nothing” – a definition suggesting, in effect, that they are mere
sounds and no longer even signifiers at all.3
With their concept Knapp and Michaels establish an airtight pri-
mary frame that would choke off all “theory” – all attempts to inter-
vene one-sidedly in the basic semiotic relation linking author, sign,
and recipient. As such, interpretation acquires a distinctly performa-
tive, rather than an epistemological, cast. Dif ferent people interpret
what they believe is someone else’s intent, and the best or most con-
vincing interpretations of the signs conveying that intent compete for
acceptance. Individual subjects constitute themselves by expressing
intentions in which they necessarily believe; their beliefs make their
own selfness accessible to others, who in turn make their own selfness
available through the act of interpretation. Belief, rather than knowl-
edge, becomes the motor of interpretation, and the subject, rather than
the signifier, its agent; the benchmark of historical criticism becomes
pragmatic and performative.
Unfortunately, Knapp and Michaels never moved beyond this first
argumentative step. The fatal flaw of their monist scheme – at least
from the performatist perspective – is that it lacks an outer frame relat-
ing the act of interpretation to human culture on some higher level. If
Knapp and Michaels’ neo-Peircian, pragmatic concept really were ope-
rative, culture would consist of endless clusters of unified interpretative
performances jostling one another until one or the other comes up on
top. The poststructuralist notion of culture as endlessly proliferating
textuality would be replaced by a pragmatic, anti-theoretical notion of
endlessly proliferating primary frames or interpretative performances.

The history of culture would become a chain of interpretative acts
elbowing one another for primacy, with “theory” – or what’s left of
it – tagging harmlessly along behind. Knapp and Michaels’ scheme
turns out to be atomistic and, in end effect, very nearly tautological.
Before interpretation, as it turns out, there is just interpretation, and
after interpretation – still more interpretation. For this reason, appar-
ently, Michaels was himself never able to develop a positive concept of
post-postmodernism.4 His work lacks an outer frame – a theory – that
would link the atomistic, belief-centered monism of anti-theory with
some overarching construct around it. Inasmuch as it stays true to its
name, anti-theory rules out any synthetic concept of literary history or
culture; its own claim to novelty remains restricted to the analytical,
nuts-and-bolts realm of argumentative logic.
This is most evident in the scene devised by Knapp and Michaels
to dismantle “theory.” In their by now well-known scenario, waves
mysteriously inscribe a pantheistic poem by Wordsworth on a sandy
beach – suggesting an originary confrontation with the possibility of
a higher, transcendent intent.5 The authors, however, in keeping with
their strict anti-theoretical agenda, don’t extend their analysis to the
structural significance of belief for the development of culture as a
whole. This rules out any Durkheimian insight into religion or cult
as the basis of secular culture, and it rules out any semiotic insight
into history as the alternation of two basic, competing sets towards
the sign – of which Knapp and Michaels’ stringent anti-theory is just
one variant. Although in itself a groundbreaking step forward into the
new monism, anti-theory was unable to formulate its own innovative
contribution in epochal terms.
Paranoid Performatism: Boris Groys’s Under Suspicion
As far as I am aware, the only critic to realize the crucial importance

of giving the new a formal theoretical justification has been the pro-
vocative Russo-German art historian and essayist Boris Groys.6 Like
Knapp and Michaels, Groys began his critique of poststructuralism
using a single-framed monism and taking performativity as the main
benchmark of innovation. Groys’s basic strategy, first set forth in his

book Über das Neue 7 �On the new], was to jump-start history again by
redefining epochal innovation – “the new” – as performance (Groys
calls it an “event”8). Groys posits the existence of two realms: the ev-
eryday or profane world and the privileged realm of the archive. Inno-
vation – and with it the historical development of art – is determined
by what gets into the archive and what is expelled from it over the
course of time. Groys argues that there is no “secret” guaranteeing
the inclusion of a profane object in the realm of artistic value. Neither
market manipulation, nor the Freudian unconscious, nor authenticity,
nor otherness, nor any other rule formulated by discourse itself is ca-
pable of regulating entry into the archive. The reason for this is that all
discursive rules themselves are subject to a performative mechanism
arising out of the tension between the archive and the profane, undif-
ferentiated world of otherness around it. According to Groys, valuable
things in the archive gain their value by presenting the profane other
in a new, exciting way. Unfortunately, the luster of this presentation
begins to dim at the very moment that it gains general acceptance in
the realm of the archive. In other words, as soon as a theory of the
profane is canonized within the archive it loses precisely that mysteri-
ous bond with the profane, other world that made it attractive to the
archive in the first place.9 The search for a new interpretation of the
profane other can then begin anew.
Using this performative theory of cultural innovation, Groys has
no trouble disposing of the main conceit of posthistorical discourse.
Deconstruction’s zigzagging, trace-guided strategy of coupling new
with old and old with new does not end history, since a quick glance
at its intellectual predecessors confirms that deconstruction’s specific
way of showing that there is nothing new is itself something new.10
Although Groys’s performative, monist redefinition of history has an
undeniable logical charm to it, it is, like “anti-theory,” dangerously
close to turning into an airtight, arid argument. If we take Groys at
his word, the only irreducible, constant element in history is a perfor-
mative mechanism that devalues its canons as soon as it grows bored
with them and replaces them with new ones. For someone familiar
with the tradition of Russian literary theory, the whole thing sounds
suspiciously like a warmed-over version of the Russian Formalist no-

tion of automatization and deautomatization, which reduced literary
history to a simple dichotomy of musty old canons and dazzling new
shock effects. As Groys himself realized, this two-dimensional, me-
chanistic definition of historical innovation wasn’t enough to grasp
the historical process in all its profundity.
With this in mind, Groys returned to the problem of the new in
a second book entitled Unter Verdacht �Under suspicion].11 In trying
to describe the “cultural economy”12 determining historical innova-
tion, Groys introduces two new structural features to his model. The
first addition is a unified sign encompassing a “submedial space”
in addition to signifier and signified; the second is what he calls a
“submedial” subject manipulating that space. In more conventional
terms, you could say that Groys introduces an ontological, an an-
thropological, and a transcendent dimension to the sign. For Groys,
signs are no longer composed of signifiers and signifieds that freely
combine and disperse in the endless ebb and flow of signification.
Rather, signs have the purpose of conveying to us something funda-
mental and mysterious about being without our ever really being able
to pinpoint what that relation is. Groys calls this profound, hidden
realm below the signifier-signified relation the “submedial space.”
This space, like the profane realm outside the archive, appears to the
archive as an ineffable other. Unlike the profane realm, though, the
submedial space is already inside the archive; it forms the substrate
of the valued objects of art within that privileged space. The ar-
chive, in other words, now has a horizontal dimension (pertaining to
the transactions between valued and profane things) and a vertical
one (per taining to a “deep,” ontological or submedial realm and a
“super ficial” or merely semiotic one). The point of including things
in the archive is to plunge into an abyss of speculation on being; the
archive itself, however, must always do this by transcending its own
closure – by reaching outside of itself – to renew the search for what
is at the root of existence. The archive, as the highest repository
of cultural value, is now, in any case, implicated in “deep,” inner
questions along with regulating economic transactions between the
valuable and the profane.
In contrast to his first model, which left the question of agency

open, Groys now introduces a half-human, half-transcendent subject
into his scheme. According to Groys, in dealing with the archive we
always suspect that an unknown someone – a “submedial subject” – is
manipulating the submedial space to his or her own ineffable ends.
The work ings of the media in the archive are hence always “under
suspicion” of being misused or abused for someone else’s purposes.
Although this suspicion can never be entirely eliminated, it is possible
to diminish it somewhat with what Groys calls the “forthrightness
effect” �Effekt der Aufrichtigkeit].13 This means that even though it is
impossible to be truly candid or forthright about the (unknowable)
workings of the archive, the effect of this can be temporarily achieved
when someone seems to reveal to us the “real” workings of ontologi-
cal or submedial space. According to Groys, this revelation occurs
mainly by way of paradox, alterity, and surprise. Signs that seem most
forthright tend to be “first of all, new, unusual, and unexpected and,
second of all, poor, base, and vulgar.”14 To sum all this up, the basic
workings of culture are rooted in a never-ending process of revelation
that seems to be manipulated by a malevolent subject with distinctly
theist capabilities – a devious God of small things, as it were, who is
really a projection of our own jealous insecurities and desires.
Whatever one happens to think of Groys’s individual conclusions,
his monist model of media culture is in structural terms directly
comparable to both generative anthropology and performatism. Like
Gans’s originary or ostensive sign, Groys’s concept of submedial space
breeds resentment that must be constantly assuaged through new acts
of signification, valuation, and regress to an unreachable origin. And,
like performatist constructs, Groys’s model of media culture consists
of a double frame (archive and sign) presided over by a distinctly the-
ist subject. In spite of these similarities, however, Groys’s attempt
to formulate a “media ontology” never quite crosses the threshold
of postmodernism. The reason for this is Groys’s tenacious, typi-
cally poststructuralist insistence on favoring knowledge over belief.
Since Groys “knows” that ontology is a bottomless pit, and since he
“knows” that there is no submedial subject or God of culture, he has
no particular interest in getting involved in the day-to-day workings
of the archive itself. Having demonstrated with epistemological means

that poststructuralist discourse is really an ontology, he is content to
walk off with the grand prize for epistemological criticism but not to
take an ontological stand himself – thus, in effect, repeating the basic
argumentative gesture of poststructuralism. Accordingly, the last sec-
tion of Unter Verdacht rounds up and interrogates the usual suspects
– Derrida, Bataille, Mauss, Lyotard etc. – but says nothing about the
across-the-board switch to monism now going on in contemporary
culture. One leaves Groys with the suspicion that although he himself
has intuitively grasped the new, monist turn to a spatially framed ap-
prehension of being, he still feels more comfortable playing the old,
postmodern game of trying to get in the last epistemological word at
all costs. This is why Groys prefers to talk about the new in the ab-
stract, as a transcendental, empty category, but not as an immanent
state or way of being – unless, of course, you happen to think that
“being” means getting constantly hoodwinked by a unseen, malicious
Other. Groys, like Michaels, leads us to the promised land of post-
postmodernism but is unable to enter it himself.
As these two examples show, the minimal conditions for overcom-
ing postmodernism would seem to be, apart from holding to a monist
concept of sign, a synthetic, rather than merely analytical, methodol-
ogy and the unequivocal grounding of discourse in ontology instead of
epistemology. The two following theories that I would like to discuss
in greater detail – Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology and Jean-Luc Marion’s
philosophy of givenness – not only meet these criteria in full but also
add, respectively, a cultural-historical dimension and a phenomenologi-
cal one to the existing body of monist, no longer postmodern theory.
Effervescent Performatism: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology
One German philosopher who has had no qualms about switch-

ing over to a monist, spatially defined ontology of culture is Peter
Sloterdijk. With his massive 2,400-page trilogy Sphären �Spheres]15
Sloterdijk has tried nothing less than to show that all human culture
is based on discrete psycho-social spaces that he divides into “bub-
bles,” “globes,” and “foams.” Although not wholly original in its basic
premise about the importance of closed-off, spiritualized space – Mir-

cea Eliade has said something similar before16 – Sloterdijk far exceeds
Eliade in the boldness of his philosophical vision and the scope of his
cultural commentaries, which range from the beginnings of civiliza-
tion to the present day and include discussions of such wildly diverse
topics as prenatal mother-child bonding, mesmerism, Heidegger’s
concept of Being-in-the-world, and the history of air-conditioning.
Sloterdijk’s own discourse in fact exemplifies the ebullient “foaming”
�Verschäumlichung {sic}] that is the focus of his third volume. Rather
than building up a carefully articulated philosophical edifice step
by step, he surges from one encapsulated sphere or topic to another,
demonstrating as he does their basic phenomenological unity in di-
versity.
As with the other theories discussed here, the outlook of spherol-
ogy is explicitly postmetaphysical. Sloterdijk is interested neither in
returning to the old global unities of classical metaphysics (at one
point, he calls his own method a “critique of round reason”17) nor in
restoring the whole, well-rounded subjects that were once thought to
reside within them. Instead, he suggests that all human culture arises
in what he calls spheres, which he defines as spatial encapsulations,
spheres, or “bubbles” �Blasen] enabling a dyadic, intimate bond to de-
velop between at least two people:
The sphere is the interiorized, developed, divisible round space

that people live in insofar as they succeed in becoming human.
Because living already always means creating spheres both
small and large, humans are the beings who erect round worlds
and gaze off into horizons. Living in spheres means creating
the dimension in which people can be contained. Spheres are
spatial creations that act like immune systems for ecstatic be-
ings upon which the outside exerts its influence.18
Translated into the by now familiar terms of performatism, this

means that the basic unit of human existence is an artificially created
frame privileging inside over out but not excluding the external world
entirely; the inner world must constantly “maintain, reconstitute, and
improve itself in the face of the provocation that is the outside.”19 Unlike
generative anthropology, Sloterdijk’s argumentation lacks any causal
explanation of the originary spherological scene; he simply posits it as
a universally empirical given, using as he does the biologically sugges-
tive metaphor of the immune system and stressing its creative, artificial
nature with evocative terms like “innenhaft” �having the character of
interiority], “Schöpfung” �creation], “erschlossen” �opened up for use,
made accessible], or “bilden” �to form]. God, rather than being an
outside entity, is the emotive froth atop this creative, bubble-blowing
performance: “God is an ecstasy arising out of the idea of competency,
which encloses the world and the subjectivities embedded within it.”20
For Sloterdijk, our own secular, technological striving is the one, ratio-
nalized side of a much older unity of outwardly directed ecstasy and
creative competence. Sloterdijk does not, of course, wish to concoct a
crypto-theological justification for modern science. However, he does
note that the most spectacular areas of research in the “living sci-
ences” – the brain, the genome, and the immune system – can hardly
be reconciled with intensified self-reflection on what is human. With
the “becoming explicit” of these and similar implicit relations, might
we not, as Sloterdijk asks, be confronted with “something completely
idiosyncratic, alien, different, something that was never implied or ex-
pected, and that can never be assimilated to our thinking?”21 In such
a case we would be dealing with a technological, object-based newness
that could not be routinely assimilated into either what traditional
phenomenology calls self-reflection or what poststructuralism calls
discourse. For Sloterdijk, the transcendent returns again as a promise
and problem through the medium of scientific discovery.
As this line of thinking makes clear, Sloterdijk is less interested in
aesthetic framing – in bracketing knowledge to bring forth beautiful
belief – than in what might be called technical framing – a way of
making things explicit by means of a creative, spatially delineated per-
formance that continually redefines the boundaries of the phenom-
enal world while invigorating our perception of it. Here, Sloterdijk is
evidently following in the antique philosophical tradition that stresses
technē and subordinates the experiencing of beauty to a way of know-
ing (a predecessor of sorts is Heidegger in his essay “The Origin of the
Work of Art”22). And, Sloterdijk’s notion that we acquire knowledge

by making the implicit explicit is, as he himself emphasizes, lifted
directly from Leibniz’s monadology – the crucial dif ference being that
the spatially limited bubble replaces the Leibnizian fold, which mean-
ders endlessly through the arabesque, ineffable Whole of a constantly
shifting reality.23
The third salient feature of Sloterdijk’s spherology is its recourse
to a specifically theist, dyadic argument that frames, unifies, and ren-
ders immanent the old metaphysical call for a unified, self-sufficient
subject and a preexistent origin. According to Sloterdijk, the mytho-
logical origin of the sphere is neither individual nor divine, but lies in
the paradoxical, coextensive reciprocity between a theist source and
the subject he creates in his own image: “man �der Mensch] is an ar-
tificial product �Kunstgebilde] that could only be created all at twice
�auf zweimal] {sic}.”24 In his following excursions into cultural history
Sloterdijk justifies this “pneumatic reciprocity,”25 or “bipolar intima-
cy”26 between the inspiring source �der Hauchende] and its inspired
recipient �der Angehauchte] on a wide variety of levels resisting reduc-
tion to any one particular discipline, category, or time. Sphären I, for
example, contains discussions of the myth of Adam’s creation; a his-
tory of “interfacial relations”; an attempt to position prenatal mother-
child relationships before Lacan’s mirror stage; a synoptic treatment of
angels, twins, and tutelary gods; an intellectual history of the “fasci-
nation with proximity,” and a good deal more. Sphären II, for its part,
deals with the grand but ultimately fruitless metaphysical attempts
to encase the world in all-encompassing “globes.” Sphären III, which
treats the ills afflicting and potentials residing in (post-)modernity, dis-
cusses the breakdown, aesthetization, and technologization of spheres
as well as their re-formation and proliferation in the guise of plural
ontologies that Sloterdijk calls “foams” and “anthropogenic islands”
(he suggests nine different island categories bearing names like the
“thanatope,” the “ergotope,” the “erototope” etc.).
For obvious reasons, it is not possible here to go into any of these
topics in any detail without oneself falling victim to what Sloterdijk
calls his “cornucopia complex.”27 It is, however, striking how Sloterdijk,
using mainly mythological examples, arrives at a concept of dyadic
reciprocity structurally similar to Gans’s and in a sense confirming

it on the level of originary mythology. Although lacking both a se-
miotic dimension and a causal explanation of its origin, Sloterdijk’s
spherology insists no less than generative anthropology on a framed
scene in which a dyadic, coextensive relationship between two found-
ing figures results in a necessary intuition of personified divinity and
initiates the beginning of culture.
Although his own spherology is manifestly monist and most cer-
tainly no longer postmodern, Sloterdijk says little or nothing about
the possibility of an epochal turn – something odd in a book that
otherwise reflects intensively and exhaustively on all aspects of (post-
)modern existence. The main reason for this seems to lie in Sloterdijk’s
one-sided fixation on spatiality and, in particular, in his effervescent
postmetaphysical concept of foams. The foams – the multitude of spa-
tially organized, ontologically founded mini-realms that have spread
out to replace the all-encompassing “globes” of classical metaphysics
– bear a deliberate structural resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s
uncontrollably proliferating rhizome.28 Sloterdijk, in fact, calls the
foams “rhizomes with an inside space” �Binnenraum-Rhizome].29 The
rhizome, as the reader may recall, consists of an unbounded network of
intersecting, relationally determined, node-like positions that lack any
ontological center, origin, ground, or end. These nodal positions (like
Leibniz’s monads and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic subject in
their Anti-Oedipus) have nothing specifically anthropological about
them; they are beholden only to the shifting patterns of energetic rela-
tionality coursing through them and not to any “outside” source like
the human. Sloterdijk, for his part, imposes precisely this unified hu-
man ground or frame on the rhizome’s anti-human dualism, breaking
it up as he does so into countless cells or bubbles existing together “in
lateral annex formations, in flat condominiums, or co-isolated asso-
ciations.”30 Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, who are content to gyre and
gimble in the rhizome’s endless, internally given relationality, Sloter-
dijk is not satisfied with taking an extended postmetaphysical bubble
bath in his own foams. Instead, he suggests the possibility of a higher
perspective, akin to that of a satellite photo, that would capture the
“unstable, momentary synthesis of a teeming agglomeration”31 made
up by the foams. If this “momentary synthesis” would be given a tem-

poral dimension, too, it would be possible to place Sloterdijk a step
ahead in time of the rhizomatic theory that he has surpassed with his
own innovative monism.
Taken in the most general philosophical and mytho-theological
terms, it would seem that Sloterdijk begins with a theist bubble-built-
for-two and allows it to proliferate in “neomonadological,”32 neo-
Leibnizian fashion (with the possibility of taking a quick theist look
at the whole thing from above, in the manner of a tutelary god or
observator, a subject touched on by Sloterdijk himself in Sphären I33).
The question nonetheless arises as to how the theist bubbles inter-
act with one another, communicate, and multiply as psycho-social
entities. Sloterdijk is for very good reasons unwilling to resort to an
energetic, non-human explanation of how the bubbles expand and
proliferate as foam – for this would lead him straight back into the
deist, dualist fold of Deleuzian poststructuralism. At the same time,
Sloterdijk also avoids the Kantian tradition in which a collective
more or less unanimously perceives phenomena as social or aesthetic
facts. Instead, he seeks an answer to the problem of communication
by resorting to a presemiotic, quasi-biological notion of mimesis or
imitation advanced by the 19th century French sociologist Gabriel
de Tarde.
Tarde is particularly intriguing from the viewpoint of generative
anthropology and performatism because of his contrary position
to Durkheim in the development of French sociology.34 Originally
considered a serious alternative to Durkheim’s more structured neo-
Kantian approach, Tarde’s radical monist, neo-Leibnizian attempt
to ascribe all interpersonal relations, social structures, and cultural
developments to the effects of imitation had faded into obscurity by
the mid 20th century. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who revived
Tarde’s line of thinking in A Thousand Plateaus,35 Sloterdijk uses
Tarde’s concept of mimesis to explain how his windowless spheres
manage to communicate with one another in spite of themselves:
“agreement among them �the spheres, R.E.] doesn’t occur through
direct exchange between the cells, but rather through the mimetic
infiltration of similar patterns, excitations, infectious goods, and
symbols into each one of them.”36 For similar reasons, Sloterdijk sees
his “erototope” operating according to René Girard’s pre-semiotic no-
tion of erotic, triangular mimesis.37 Eros is accordingly not “a dual-
libidinous tension between an Ego and an Other, but a triangular
provocation.”38 Projected onto a global stage, this sort of erotic and
social jealousy comes to resemble the problem of resentment as out-
lined by Gans. Sloterdijk sums this up in the following way: “If the
cultural theory were to pose a question to the twenty-first century, it
would be this: whether modernity can bring its experiment with the
globalization of jealousy under control.”39
The distinction between spherology and Gans’s generative anthro-
pology resides not only in the lack of a semiotic perspective, but also
in Sloterdijk’s assumption of a postcapitalist, mimetic exchange mech-
anism that would, as it were, submerge both traditional contractual
and naturalistic explanations of human coexistence in a gigantic bed
of foams.40 This is, obviously, not the proper place to stage a High-
Noon-style showdown between Gans’s neo-Kantian semiotics and
Sloterdijk’s neo-Leibnizian energetics. It is, however, interesting to ob-
serve how two major lines of poststructuralist thought are extended and
corrected in the new monist thinking. Gans clamps a unifying frame
around the Derridean concept of sign to make it monist; Sloterdijk
does the same to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome.
Sloterdijk’s spherology, although unable or unwilling to address
its own temporality, offers a rich grab bag of themes, topics, projects,
and perspectives for the coming performatist epoch. The first, most
notable project is a massive revision of cultural history from a mo-
nist perspective. This revision applies in particular to postmodernism,
which Sloterdijk assimilates to his notion of spheres without so much
as batting an eyelash – or engaging in the withering sort of analytical
criticism practiced in anti-theory. Another innovative move vis-à-vis
postmodernism is the revival of science as a revelatory technē rather
than as mere fodder for translation into discourse. And, Sloterijk’s
off-the-wall, “round” sociology of foams or anthropogenic islands
offers an alternative to the “square,” Durk heimian tradition that is
more attuned to the analysis of social convention. From the literary
or cinematic point of view, the theme of spatially conditioned hu-
man proximity developed by Sloterdijk has a direct relevance for per-

formatist plots, where it is played out continually in spheres, frames,
cubes, rooms, and cages.
Summing up his own results in Sphären III in an oblique way,
Sloterdijk allows one of the participants in an imaginary round-table
discussion to speak of his work as “postpessimistic”41 – thus explic-
itly confirming the metaphysical optimism that is characteristic of
performatism and anathema to postmodernism. Also congenial to
performatism is Sloterdijk’s interest in paradoxality. In his imaginary
discussion, he has another critic note how an oxymoronic, sphero-
logical discourse would allow “the conversion from a monotonously
pessimistic science to a sad-happy one” that would correspond to a
“contemporary form of the docta ignorantia �“doctrine of learned
ignorance,” R.E.].”42 Precisely this paradoxical, artificially induced
conflation of outer knowledge and inner ignorance plays a central role
in performatist aesthetics – and in the phenomenology of the next
monist author to be treated below.
Phenomenological Performatism: Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given
As I have pointed out in passing,43 performatism is a kind of phe-

nomenology turned inside out. Instead of bracketing belief in order
to achieve knowledge, performatist works bracket knowledge using
artificial, manipulative means in order to achieve belief – a strategy
that explicitly exploits Derrida’s critique of the Kantian frame. Instead
of being neutral or secondary, the brackets are now a crucial part of
the aesthetic experience itself: they exert a tangible, coercive effect on
the observer. Inside the bracket or frame “old,” distinctly metaphysical
relations regarding love, beauty, unity etc. are once again made ope-
rative without however attaining universal validity (the fact that there
is a palpable “outside” underlines their particularity and undercuts
their universal truth-value). The main conceit of performatist works
is that this immanent inner unity might be, or should be, transferred
en bloc to the outside realm – a conceit that is, of course, not provable
or necessarily doable in any real way. Seen this way, performatism ap-
pears as a kind of reversal or parody of the Derridean frame, which
deconstructs the old phenomenological epokhē by demonstrating that

the brackets themselves – and not the enclosed content – are the cru-
cial part of the whole phenomenological enterprise. Performatism, in
other words, bends the Derridean scheme inward by assigning the
brackets an aesthetic-compulsive, rather than an epistemological, va-
lence and by restricting what would other wise be metaphysical pre-
mises to a purely immanent domain. Aesthetically mediated belief
– experienced in a phenomenological frame or scene – and not the
fluid, constantly receding positions of semiotically mediated, a poste-
riori knowing gains the upper hand.
This bending inward of the Derridean deconstruction of phe-
nomenology is admittedly an ad hoc strategy – I am more concerned
with defining performatism in term of specific aesthetic devices rather
than work ing out a philosophical program of my own. However, it
is all the more interesting to observe how a professional philosopher
and theologian goes about reversing the Derridean deconstruction of
phenomenology in a similar, albeit more exacting way.
The philosopher in question is Jean-Luc Marion, who has been de-
veloping a phenomenological counter-strategy to deconstruction since
the late 1980s. In the following remarks, I’d like to focus on Marion’s
major work Being Given,44 which has striking structural similarities to
the projects of generative anthropology and performatism. Accordingly,
the angle of approach will be typological rather than philosophical
in the strict sense of the word. Rather than attempting a critique of
Marion’s individual arguments, I would like to demonstrate his more
general affinity with Gans’s and my own semiotically based concepts.
With its distinctly Kantian, aesthetic tilt, Marion’s phenomenology
also presents a distinct counterpoint to Sloterdijk’s emphasis on techno-
logically mediated knowing and neomonadological foams.
Marion’s phenomenological point of departure is what he calls
givenness, which he opposes to the traditional phenomenological
preoccupation with objectness (Husserl) and Being (Heidegger).
Marion, in other words, seeks to shift the focus of phenomenology
from a positivistic apprehension of things or an existential interpreta-
tion of man’s condition to the analysis of a purely immanent domain
(givenness) involving the relations between a giver, a givee, and a gift.
Translated into performatist terms, Marion establishes givenness as an

outer frame in whose immanent boundaries certain irreducible value
transactions take place. This immanent domain in turn contains a
starting point for a new synthetic, upsurge – an inner frame – that
when taken to its outer limits would transcend the immanent field of
givenness itself. In short, Marion formulates a performative phenom-
enology of givenness that has important repercussions for the study of
art, culture, and religion.
Marion begins by defining givenness in terms borrowed direct-
ly from Kantian aesthetics. Using an “ordinary, indeed mediocre”45
painting as the starting point of his discussion, Marion suggests that its
givenness is dependent neither on the material status of its objectness
(what Heidegger calls subsistence or Vorhandenheit) nor on the ability
of the given to be used or manipulated in practical terms (the ready-
to-hand, or Zuhandenheit). Drawing on the terminology employed
by Groys, you could say that the painting’s givenness can neither be
traced back to the material substrate of its signs (paint, canvas, etc.)
nor to the way it is manipulated in economic or pragmatic terms (e.g.,
placed in or removed from a museum). Unlike Groys, Heidegger, and
Derrida, however, Marion refuses to subsume the beauty of the paint-
ing to a search for truth: “Beauty is accomplished and abolished in the
truth.”46 Instead, Marion draws on the Kantian definition of beauty as
something corresponding neither to a concrete end nor to a concept:
“the painting �...] obeys a finality for which no concept provides the
objective representation.”47 The catch here is the deliberate mediocrity
of the painting – something alien to Kant’s argumentation. Since the
banal painting has no special attraction to us above and beyond its
own visibility, its analysis is, according to Marion, applicable to every-
thing else, for “then all ordinary phenomenality, whose paradigm it
would be, could also be reduced to a given.”48 In Groysian terms, you
could say that Marion privileges a cultural object inside the archive,
but deliberately weakens its pretensions to lasting or “eternal” value
– the painting in question is in fact close to being ejected from the ar-
chive entirely. Conversely, Marion’s definition also raises the chances
of mediocre objects outside the archive being included in it at some fu-
ture time. The result is a distinctly Kantian definition of givenness in
terms of what might be called weak beauty. By definition, this weak,

phenomenal beauty transcends the bounds of any archive and can be
found in all of cultural reality.
If the phenomenality of the painting is not subordinate to prag-
matic ends, to concepts, to truth, or to the archive, then just how does
it work? Unlike Groys, who at this point reverts to a non-committal,
purely epistemological account of how cultural value is churned out in
a process of endless regress, Marion takes a specific ontological stand.
To the ontic visibility of the painting is now added an “upsurge” or
“coming forward”49 that can be said to “impose”50 itself on the viewer.
As Marion suggests, “it is no longer a matter of seeing what is, but of
seeing its coming up into visibility �…].”51 It is not really the viewer
that does this, but the painting itself: “the initiative always falls to the
painting itself, which decides, as a long-closed barrier yields, to let us
reach what is all too visible for us to be able to represent it as a mere
being.”52 The painting thus moves from invisibility to visibility by ap-
pearing in its imposing, binding givenness to a viewer who must “fall
in alignment” with its “immanent axis.”53
The term Marion uses to describe this movement – anamorphosis
– is both auspicious and uncannily familiar.54 For anamorphosis is an
almost literal translation of the phrase per formam – “ana” means “move-
ment across” and “morphosis” pertains to form. At its core, then, the
new phenomenology of givenness is a kind of performance in the sense
that I have been establishing it throughout this book. Seen in this way,
anamorphosis corresponds in pictorial or visual terms to a primary
frame binding author, art work, and viewer in a single, dynamic, bind-
ing unity. As we have however seen beforehand, simply establishing this
performative unity is not enough (as the case of “against theory” dem-
onstrates). We must also address the problem of how this inner frame
relates to things outside and above it (as marked by an outer frame)
and how this relation affects the subject that is caught in its phenom-
enological “lock.” Before turning to these questions, however, it is first
necessary to deal with the deconstructive critique that presents itself as
an unavoidable given in any discussion of gifts, giving, and givenness.
The main obstacle on the way to defining an immanent domain of
givenness is without a doubt Derrida’s well-known deconstruction of
Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift in Given Time.55 Derrida’s demolition

of Mauss’s “insane”56 essay is a crucial challenge not only to any pheno-
menology of giving, but also to the entire project of reviving the Durk-
heimian tradition, which suggests that originary, socially given sacrality
continues to influence and organize even advanced secular culture.
Derrida’s by now classic exposition demonstrates with devastating
efficacy that Mauss’s essay on the sacral economy of the gift is a kind
of metaphysical shell game in which the very conditions used to define
the gift at the same time work to exclude its appearance. Taking Mauss
exactly at his word, Derrida shows that the gift can only function as
a gift when a) it isn’t part of the exchange system that it’s supposed
to organize; b) the givee isn’t aware of it; c) the giver isn’t aware of it
either; and d) the gift doesn’t itself ever achieve presence. Put in pheno-
menological terms, the gift can only appear when it has been bracketed
out of existence from the very start. The only real gift you get from
participating in this economy, it would seem, is that of insanity – since
anyone who believes in the monist unity underlying it would have to be
completely off his rocker.
Marion does not dispute Derrida’s analysis, and, indeed, he runs
through it again in some detail in order to confirm its basic veracity.
Marion’s aim is not to refute Derrida’s deconstruction but to take it a
step further – to undertake an even more radical bracketing that allows
us to focus on the purely immanent side of the gift as opposed to the
metaphysical side reinscribed – and rendered ridiculous – by Derrida.
As Marion notes, Derrida is first and foremost interested in a general
critique of metaphysics rather than in working out a positive phenom-
enology of the gift: “in identifying the possibility of the gift with its
impossibility, this contradiction �i.e., the one uncovered by Derrida,
R.E.] states the essence of nothing at all, therefore not of any gift what-
soever.”57 If we are to talk about the gift it is, according to Marion,
necessary to speak about it in terms of its possibility, rather than impos-
sibility. This, in turn, can only take place beneath the threshold of the
metaphysical-economic model used by both Mauss and Derrida:
The standard model of the gift in fact eliminates the gift – at

least the gift as complete loss, such that it would imply a break
of the circle and a suspension of the gift’s return, of the gift in

return. If the truth of the gift resides in the payback, the truth
lowers it to the status of a loan.58
Marion’s response to this metaphysical-pragmatic model is to un-

dertake what he calls a “triple epokhē” revealing precisely that imman-
ent phenomenality supposedly written off forever in Derrida’s gen-
eral critique of metaphysics. This triple epokhē or bracketing of givee,
giver, and gift involves a move that, as I have mentioned above, owes
a great deal to Kantian aesthetics. For in order to recover the gift in
its phenomenological immanence, Marion must sever it from all pur-
posive and metaphysical ties. In this realm of redoubled bracketing,
Marion is able to reveal numerous phenomenal manifestations of non-
circular, uneconomical giving that were swept under the rug in the
course of Derrida’s deconstruction. Marion can show convincingly,
for example, that it is possible to bracket the givee when the gift is
anonymous, or when the givee is an enemy or an ingrate (someone
incapable of, or unwilling to, indulge in reciprocity). As a case in point
one can take the ingrate. Even as he asserts the metaphysical principle
of self-identity (“I don’t owe anything to anyone”) his conduct “lays
bare the pure immanence of the gift”59 since the ingrate shows that the
gift “is perfectly accomplished without the givee’s consent.”60 With
his ingratitude, in other words, the givee shows that the immanent,
anti-metaphysical performance of the gift – its “losing itself without
return,” its break with “self-identity”61 – is so real a threat in phenom-
enal terms that it becomes something well worth denying.
This surprising revelation of phenomenological immanence applies
no less to Marion’s way of bracketing of the giver and the gift, which
I can only touch on here in passing. It will suffice to say that Mari-
on’s phenomenological readings appear strikingly refreshing and rich
when read against the background of Derrida’s merciless, predictably
aporetic dismantling of Mauss. Thus Marion has no trouble showing
that it is indeed possible to bracket the gift as an object, for this is pre-
cisely what takes place when power is bestowed on someone or when
someone gives his or her word (power and confidence are not objects
that can be exchanged). Marriage vows have this character, too. If you
were merely to give yourself as a sexual object when getting married,

it would lower the entire institution of marriage to something akin to
prostitution; the phenomenological function of marriage vows is to
deny this purely material or economic relation.62 Similarly, the simple
case of inheritance suffices to show how giving need not depend on
any form of reciprocal economic (and metaphysical) exchange. If the
giver doesn’t physically exist any more, any exchange mechanism is
rendered void to begin with – and the phenomenality of giving is once
more confirmed as something that doesn’t require the giver’s metaphy-
sical or pragmatic presence.
The most elegant move on Marion’s part, possibly, is to show that
différance itself can be made the object of giving. This evidently holds
true in the case of indebtedness to an inaccessible giver. For in “recog-
nizing its debt the givee’s consciousness becomes self-consciousness,
because the debt itself precedes all consciousness of it and defines its
self.”63 The givee, in experiencing the non-repayable debt as anterior to
his own consciousness, is constituted by this lack, just as the gift itself
is constituted by its own lack of a giver, who is in turn determined by
his own lack of a gift. Givenness, then, consists in a kind of double
or even triple origin, with each member of the triad always already
being preceded and anticipated by the others: “Differance therefore
passes from the giver to the gift given, then from the gift given to the
givee.”64 Instead of acting as an epistemological universal solvent that
can eat through anything ontological that it touches, différance is now
encased in a frame that turns it into the content of an irreducible,
real performance that breaks its metaphysical circularity and passes it
onward, into a new, open-ended teleology. (This may be see in anal-
ogy to the simpler case outlined by Groys, in which deconstruction’s
specific way of sabotaging the new can itself be partitioned off and
identified as a distinctly new performance impervious to its own in-
ternal, merely epistemological critique of innovation in its irreducible
filiation with the old.)
In his analysis, Marion explicitly denies any dependence on a socio-
logical or anthropological model.65 However, his phenomenological
argumentation would seem to be confirmed by Erving Goffman’s so-
ciology of everyday behavior, which suggests that people are surrounded
by previously given, invisible, but nonetheless socially evident frames

staking out domains of trust, power, decorum, stigmatization etc.66
The degree to which these domains “modulate” (Marion’s term re-
garding givenness67) or become subject to “keying” (Goffman’s term
regarding frames68) would then be open to a mixed phenomenologi-
cal and sociological analysis. And, to the extent that Goffman con-
tinues the line of approach begun by Durkheim, in which socially
given sacral frames continue to determine secular behavior,69 it would
seem entirely possible to reconcile Marion’s thought with a post-meta-
physical anthropology of sacred social origins or givens. While it is not
possible here to delve further into either the sociological or anthropo-
logical implications of Marion’s phenomenology, it would be possible
in principle to recapture many of its insights in the pragmatic realm
that Marion excludes in the pursuit of a philosophically rigorous argu-
mentation.70
Having confirmed that Marion’s phenomenology is not simply a
return to metaphysics as understood by Derrida, I would now like to
address some of the issues involved in Marion’s definition of given-
ness. Assuming that the visual performance or anamorphosis works as
it does, it is legitimate to ask of it the same questions directed at anti-
theory and Groys’s monist theory of suspicion. How does “givenness”
differentiate and develop? Where are its boundaries? Who or what
mediates it? And, finally, does it have any self-consciousness of its own
epochal innovation?
As I have already suggested, one of Marion’s major affinities with
performatism consists in his modifying Kantianism in such a way
as to cast givenness in terms of a weak, non-conceptual beauty that
imposes itself on the viewer in a unified visual performance (the “be-
coming visible” of a given object for a subject, or anamorphosis). This
mild but sweeping aestheticization of phenomenal reality is in turn
accompanied by another crucial move owing a great deal to, but also
correcting, Kant. This move, whose importance for founding the new
monism cannot be overestimated, is the turn to Kantian intuition (An-
schauung), which Marion places firmly before the concept:
To be sure, intuition without concept is as blind as the concept

without intuition is empty; but blindness counts more here

than vacuity: even blind, intuition still gives, while the con-
cept, even if it alone can make the given seen, remains as such
perfectly empty, therefore quite incapable of seeing anything
whatsoever. Intuition without concept, though still blind, never-
theless gives material to an object, while the concept without
intuition, though not blind, sees nothing, since nothing has yet
been given to it to see.71
This radical privileging of intuition is, of course, at odds with Kant

and most of Western philosophical tradition (including deconstruc-
tion, which “feeds” on already existing binary concepts). From Mar-
ion’s point of view, philosophy traditionally favors phenomena poor
in intuition (i.e., logical and mathematical phenomena that are often
unreal72); keying in on these phenomena, in turn, blocks out access to
a whole wealth of phenomena both “extreme” and “common-law” in
nature (regarding the latter, he names “the beings of nature, the living
in general, the historical event, the face of the Other in particular”73).
As Marion emphasizes, “none of the real phenomena with which we
traffic daily and obligatorily can be analyzed adequately, and what
is more, they are barely even granted the right to appear.”74 Apart
from these everyday givens, the focus of a phenomenology of given-
ness would be on phenomena that Marion calls rich in intuition or
“saturated”; they would be phenomena that “would give more, indeed
immeasurably more, than the intention would ever have aimed at or
foreseen.”75
Once again, Marion’s notion of saturation is heavily indebted to
Kant’s aesthetics. For in Kant’s notion of the aesthetic idea (as inter-
preted by Marion), “intuition is no longer exposed in the concept; it
saturates it and renders it overexposed – invisible, unreadable not by
lack, but indeed by an excess of light.”76 In the aesthetic idea, in other
words, the concept is occluded by the intuition of an object that now
unfolds, to use Kant’s words directly, in its own “free play.” 77 And
this “free play,” as Marion suggests, is not just qualitatively beauti-
ful in the narrow Kantian sense, but must also be opened to include
the quantitative dimension of the sublime. Given these conditions,
it is now possible to reconstruct the field of givenness in its entire

phenomenal range. It stretches, degree by degree, from the intuitively
apprehended, weakly beautiful becoming visible or anamorphosis of a
phenomenon to the outer bounds of a sublime, heavily saturated intu-
ition arising when a phenomenon exceeds its own conceptualization
in paradox. The inner frame (marked by anamorphosis) and the outer
frame (marked by the sublime, dazzling occlusion of the concept in
paradox) reveal themselves as part of one and the same immanent
field. At the same time, they serve to delineate that field from mere
unmediated materiality and from any metaphysical concept purport-
ing to regulate that field from without.
While it isn’t possible here to treat Marion’s discussion of saturation
and paradox in anything other than a cursory way, it is worth dwell-
ing briefly on four “topics of the phenomenon” suggested by Marion
near the end of his exposition – topics derived from the saturation of
the Kantian concepts of quantity, quality, relation, and modality.
Marion calls the first such topic “the event.” The function of the
event is, stated most simply, to make history once more possible. The
event “is not limited to an instant, a place, or an empirical individual,”
but “covers a physical space such that no gaze encompasses it with one
sweep” and “encompasses a population such that none of those who
belong to it can take upon themselves an absolute or even privileged
point of view �…].”78 The paradigm of this kind of event is the battle,
“which makes itself of itself, starting from a point of view that it alone
can unify, without any unique horizon.”79 The resulting “plurality” or
“proliferation of horizons,” “forbids constituting the historical event
into one object and demands substituting an endless hermeneutic in
time”; out of this endless hermeneutic eventually results a “histori-
cal community.”80 Although Marion suggests that the event has an
“epoch-making” function (it “delimits a homogenous duration and
imposes it as ‘a block’”81), he does not go into detail as to how such a
“homogenous duration” could impose itself upon the supposedly end-
less range of hermeneutical positions. For my purposes it will suffice to
say that Marion succeeds in refocusing our attention on the phenome-
nological origins of history – his starting point is the saturated battle
and not the polyunsaturated discourse about the battle. However, he
remains vague on the crucial question of how epochal or framed time

imposes itself on historical discourse after the event. Clearly, this is
a line of argumentation demanding some sort of explication of the
temporal “block” or epoch.
Marion links the second topic, that of the “idol,” with the previous-
ly discussed model of painting and of anamorphosis. The difference
is now that instead of a weak, mediocre “upsurge,” he allows for the
possibility of a highly saturated, aesthetically dazzling performance
on the part of the work of art. This is the domain of aesthetics proper,
or, to use Groys’s institutional term, the archive. Because in the case
of the idol intuition always “surpasses the concept �…] proposed to
welcome it” the result is a continual renewal of aesthetic experience:
“The intuitive given of the idol imposes on us the demand to change
our gaze again and again, continually, be this only so as to confront
its unbearable bedazzlement.”82 Unlike Kant – upon whose notion of
beauty and sublimity this is based – Marion denies the common ne-
cessity of this bedazzlement, suggesting instead that the idol provokes
an “ineluctable solipsism”83 comparable to Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit
or Mineness. For the time being, it will be suf ficient simply to note
Marion’s insistence on aesthetic solipsism, which stands in direct op-
position to Kant’s aesthetic collectivism arising out of the necessarily
same reaction of different observers to the beauty of the object.84 (The
reason for Marion’s un-Kantian insistence on the solipsism of aesthetic
experience is theological and reveals itself shortly thereafter.)
With the third topic, “the flesh,” Marion introduces a specifically
erotic and emotional component to his saturated phenomena. The
flesh marks the invisible point where contact of what feels with the
felt exceeds any relational category around it, as in ecstasy, agony,
grief, feeling, orgasm etc. To this general list of “auto-affections” Mar-
ion also adds culturally or philosophically more specified borderline
states such as “the evidence of love,” Proust’s “living remembrance,”
or Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling.”85 Needless to say, the flesh
remains personal due to its over whelming immediacy. The experi-
ence of the flesh also ends in solipsism, although of a more radical
variety than was the case with the idol (the flesh “gives me to my-
self”86). Marion’s discussion of the flesh, in any case, would initiate
a monist phenomenology of intuitive affect – and not simply tack

already always conceptualized signs onto the bare behind of presemi-
otic physical experience, as is now the practice in deconstruction and
postfeminism.87
Finally, Marion speaks of “the icon,” which represents the “ulti-
mate point”88 of anamorphosis and resides on the very outer rim of the
immanent. From the performatist point of view, the icon is a stand-in
for that theist, ineffable subject which may or may not exist outside
the realm of immanent givenness (depending, of course, on what you
believe or suspect). The icon, according to Marion, is an Other that
imposes its own face and gaze onto the spectator in such a way that he
or she gives itself over entirely to its silent force. The gaze and the face
of the Other can only be “endured,” and not reduced “to the rank of a
constituted spectacle”; 89 the icon in this way exceeds what turns out to
be the mere aestheticity of the idol. Similarly, the icon breaks through
the solipsism of both the idol and the flesh. Transfixed by the icon, the
spectator renounces his “own transcendental function of constitution”
and becomes what Marion calls a “witness,” i.e., someone constituted
first and foremost by an other, personified gaze allowing no reflexiv-
ity. Accordingly, Marion assigns to the icon the power of synthesizing
the other three aspects of saturation previously discussed. Like the
event it “demands a summation of horizons and narrations”;90 like the
idol it “begs to be seen and reseen,”91 albeit in a mode of endurance
rather than enjoyable bedazzlement; and like the flesh it affects the I
so intensely that it loses its transcendental bearings in a kind of selfless
ecstasy. With the supremely potent, barely resistible figure of the icon,
Marion reaches the limits of the immanent field first established in the
inner frame of “weak” anamorphosis.
Even for someone unfamiliar with Marion’s professional creden-
tials, it is hardly surprising at this point that his discussion now takes
an explicit theological turn. Having synthesized the saturated phe-
nomena of the event, the idol, and the flesh in the mediating, Christ-
like figure of the icon, Marion leaves the sector of the immanent and
begins to expound upon the possibility of a “saturation of saturation”
in Christian revelation – something he doesn’t even pretend to justify
in purely immanent terms. How are we to deal with this (not entirely
unexpected) leap into transcendence? Are we being “framed” so that

we have no choice but to accept a purely theological interpretation
of givenness? Or – what is no better – are we supposed to discount
Marion’s immanent phenomenology of givenness because it originates
outside the frame, in open metaphysical space?
The answer, at least from my perspective, is a double “no.” Seen
from an epochal bird’s-eye view, Marion’s own argumentation mere-
ly recreates the typical narrative structure of performatist works in
general. Marion begins by establishing an immanent field composed
of a double frame. The inner frame – anamorphosis – encloses im-
mediately given objects of perception and draws them into the phe-
nomenal field; the outer frame – the icon – marks the outer bound-
ary separating that field from an unknown Outside. Within this
field, surprising, innovative things happen – not least because it op-
erates the exact same way that any other aesthetic field operates (by
occluding conceptuality and practical finality). Having encouraged
us to accept this immanent field of argumentation (itself saturated
with many surprises), Marion then goes a step further and tran-
scends it himself. In an authorial performance of his own, he dares us
to accept a transcendent, or outside, explanation that we can only
believe in or reject. What is relevant here is not the actual content of
Marion’s outside solution, which can’t be proven one way or another.
Rather, it is the fact that it reinforces and gives direction to our
previous position, which has been to assume the stance of a believer
per se. As critical individuals, we have every right to remain skeptical
about Ma rion’s doubly saturated Revelation. However, we have been
compelled by the immanent force of his argument to assume, at least
temporarily and intuitively, the possibility of its truth within what
is in effect an aesthetic frame. Whether we like it or not, we have
been made to take on the phenomenological stance of believers. Whe-
ther of course we continue to maintain this stance on a conceptual,
“outside” level is quite another issue – for most secular individuals
this will not be an option at all. However, many secular individuals
– including myself – have no difficulty at all maintaining this at-
titude on the intuitive, aesthetic level, where there is no need (and
where there are no means) to express belief in a dogmatically bind-
ing, conceptualized way.

In essence, all performatist works do the same thing. They begin
by creating a compelling immanent scene – an aesthetic “given” whose
intrinsic or immanent logic imposes itself forcefully on the viewer or
reader (anamorphosis). This “givenness” is by nature saturated with
scenes, relations, images etc. that acquire an entirely new, paradoxical
logic within the context of the frame – a logic that is experienced in-
tuitively and objectively by the observer as something that must be be-
lieved (the observer usually has little or no choice in the matter, short
of ignoring the work entirely). This half-intuitive, half-coercive expe-
rience of aesthetically mediated belief in conceptually implausible giv-
ens sometimes comes with strings attached from outside. For example,
at the end of a movie we may be asked to accept what is ultimately
a transcendent explanation, as in American Beauty. More often than
not, though, this explanation is simply deferred; the plot resolution is
offered as a new given that can be taken up again in the future (this
is the case in “realistic” works like Idiots or Simple Stories92). The fact
that we are made aware that there is an “outside” to the aesthetic
frame or field of givenness doesn’t render its immanent logic invalid.
It does, however, encourage us to take on a synthetic attitude causing
us to reach out past the given frame and solve the problem at hand in
a new, perhaps more successful way. This synthetic “set” of performa-
tism towards transcending any given frame leads to a basic metaphysi-
cal optimism, even if the concrete, immediate results happen to be
very meager.
Another productive perspective opened by Marion’s phenomenol-
ogy is the juxtaposition of a closed, solipsistic subject and an open
subject “set” to transcendence; this subject is so susceptible to satu-
rated givenness that it practically waits for the icon to come along and
mesmerize it. While Marion is clearly prejudiced toward this latter
type of religious sensibility, he accurately captures the spatial poles
between which the subject must move if it is to overcome its own
limitations in a performance (a topic discussed previously in Chapter
One). The closed or solipsistic feeling of self is needed to focus the self
enough to achieve an aim or intent; this aim or intent must however
by nature lead outside the frame of the subject formulating it. Obvi-
ously, secular aesthetics and religious phenomenology differ greatly in

what paths such a transcending of closure can take. Here, Sloterdijk’s
ebullient account of intimate dyadic relationships is probably closer
to the pulse of post-postmodern life than is Marion’s mode of abject
waiting-to-be-called.93
One way of testing Marion’s own notion of phenomenal givenness
in terms of practical aesthetic judgments is to try it out very briefly
on a movie like American Beauty, which encourages belief both ex-
plicitly and implicitly in the way I’ve described above. As I’d like to
show, Marion’s own theory is not an “icon” staring the work down
into a state of sheer, passive compliance. Rather, when applied, his
theory itself succumbs to the anamorphosis exerted by the work upon
it. American Beauty confirms, but at the same time ironically twists
and turns the central intentions of Marion’s phenomenology within
the movie’s own givenness or aesthetic frame.
One of the visually most highly saturated moments of the movie
is the becoming visible of Angela at the high-school basketball game
that Lester at first doesn’t at all want to attend. Lester, entranced by
his first sight of the what is evidently a female idol, brackets players,
cheerleaders, and spectators to focus entirely on Angela, who gives
herself as an erotic object by returning Lester’s gaze in kind (the cam-
era cuts from Lester’s bracketed vision to Angela’s equally bracket-
ed perspective, which shows Lester sitting alone on the high school
gymnasium’s bleachers). Seduction, as Marion says, “plays itself out
by constituting it first in and through the response, which alone can
attest it by rendering it, for the first time, audible and visible.”94 This
invisible unity of call and response is given to us, in turn, and shows
itself, through the medium of film. Later, this merely erotic unity will
be transformed into the synthetic, totalized response to givenness that
Marion calls “responsibility.” Lester will feel himself not just ethically
responsible for Angela as the Other (he does this, too), but achieve an
expansion of self (“I’m great”95) and a synthetic, passive vision of the
world’s beauty that is consummated in the gift of death bestowed on
him by Colonel Fitts (“I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every
moment of my stupid little life…”96).
This synthesis, however, remains unmediated by an icon in Mar-
ion’s sense. The only figure even vaguely reminiscent of the icon is,
arguably, Ricky Fitts, whose own gaze, as mediated by the video cam-
era, is anything but unreturnable and unendurable. In fact, the me-
dium of video itself makes his gaze readily accessible both to us and to
various characters in the movie (the Colonel and Jane). If anything,
Ricky is an intermediary for the icon: he has the ability to gaze back
at the Other through the medium of the dead Face, which he makes
memorable by capturing it on film.97 (Interestingly enough, when
looking at Lester’s face after the latter’s death, Ricky participates in
pictorial anamorphosis literally: he must slant his head in an unnatu-
ral way in order to look eye to eye with Lester.)
This moment of reciprocity with the supposedly unbearable gaze
of the Other is, obviously, alien to Marion’s theologically justified
phenomenology. For what Ricky perceives or intuits in the face of the
Other is not the window to pure, blinding transcendence, but a mix-
ture of sublimity and beauty: it is the gift of God back to the viewer.
American Beauty, in other words, “recycles” the spiritualized aesthetic
givenness that in Marion’s theology is simply the first, transitory step
towards receiving a gift that is so totally saturated as to defy any rep-
resentation whatsoever. American Beauty seeks to intensify saturation
in the here and now (hence the paradoxical title); Marion would defer
its completion to the hereafter.
A final note is in order on the similarities between the phenom-
enology of givenness and Eric Gans’s concept of ostensivity that I’ve
been using throughout this book. In Marion’s phenomenology, as we
have seen, the saturated phenomena work to subvert, occlude, and ex-
ceed all conceptuality, finality, and intentionality. As such, the saturat-
ed phenomena may be thought to send out what Marion characterizes
as a “call” to a particularly receptive post-metaphysical subject that he
names “the gifted.” Rather than realizing metaphysical goals such as
the preser vation of discrete self-identity,98 the gifted subject “is com-
pletely achieved as soon as he surrenders unconditionally to what gives
itself – and first of all to the saturated phenomenon that calls him.”99
In its originary mode, the call and the “responsal”100 of the gifted
bear a striking resemblance to the ostensive ur-scene outlined by Eric
Gans. Here Marion’s version of the originary moment:
For every mortal, the first word was always already heard before
he could utter it. To speak always and first amounts to passively
hearing a word coming from the Other, a word first and always
incomprehensible, which announces no meaning or significa-
tion, other than the very alterity of the initiative, by which the
pure fact gives (itself) (to be thought) for the first time.101
Unlike Gans, Marion has no concept of mimetic conflict that gener-

ates the “pure fact” of the first word and the “very alterity” of its ini-
tiative. However, his phenomenological synopsis can be assimilated to
Gans’s semiotic notion of the originary, ostensive scene with surprising
ease. In both cases, the originary subjects constitute themselves as hu-
mans through the givenness of the sign, which, although nominally
passed from one speaker to an Other as a spontaneous “gift,” can be
constituted as such only after the Other accepts it intuitively, rather
than semantically or conceptually. At the same time, this acceptance
engenders a “saturated,” tension-filled paradox by relinquishing the
object that the sign designates as a gift to a givee who, technically
speaking, cannot accept it in full without destroying the equilibrium
of the originary scene.102 And, as in Marion’s scenario, différance is
passed on down the line without vitiating the original unifying and
violence-deferring power of the originary ostensive sign.103
Within the frame of this originary scenario, intuition (Anschauung,
literally “the looking at” what is given) may be considered the flip side
of the ostensive (the “showing of” the sign and its spontaneous accep-
tance by another protohuman in place of the coveted object). For both
giver and givee of the word (protohuman one and protohuman two
in Gans’s scenario), the word shared by them is correctly experienced
as a gift from without, for it creates them as much as they create it.
Much the same can be said to apply to Marion’s originary call: “the
call �...] individualizes me, because it separates me from all property or
possession of the proper by giving it to me and letting this proper an-
ticipate its reception by me and as me.”104 For both Gans and Marion,
the givenness of the first sign necessitates structural speculation on
what is “beyond” the given. Neither, however, are dependent on this
kind of speculation to establish their basic arguments. Marion, for

example, divides his own exposition into a rigorously immanent, post-
metaphysical argumentation and an openly theological one; Gans, for
his part, has no systematic theology apart from a certain historically
justified sympathy for monotheism.
Gans and Marion would also have no trouble agreeing that there
is nothing authentic about their originary situations; both, in effect,
accept and continue Derrida’s critique of classical metaphysics in a
monist mode. The gift of language, as Marion says, is “originally non-
originary”105 because it always comes from the Other. For Gans, the
originary scene lacks any pure or ideal relationship of adequacy be-
tween sign and thing or sign and self; the triangular relationship be-
tween rival protohumans and the sign can’t be reduced to any one part
or any one combination of parts. If any thing, the opacity of unseen,
personal selfness – its striving for metaphysical closure – engenders re-
sentment and endangers the intuitive, collective reconciliation made
possible by the gift of the sign.
Obviously, there are also numerous differences between the two
theories. Although both are grounded in paradox (which Gans con-
siders a semiotic necessity106 no less than Marion considers it a phe-
nomenal one), their respective arguments quickly veer off in secular
and theological directions. In Gans’s minimal scene the paradoxical
substitution of the sign for the thing creates both reconciliation and
resentment; from the very start, the ostensive scene is rife with a mi-
metic, centrifugal tension whose continual resolution-through-defer-
ral sets a history in motion that is “the story of our liberation from the
sacred.”107 Although the name-of-God – Gans’s term for the originary
sign – cannot be forgotten, it can very well indeed be displaced from
the center of society. Gans’s thinking is more “realistic” than Marion’s
in the sense that his theory accepts and justifies the prevailing order
brought forth by liberal democracy and market capitalism (both divert
mimetic desire away from a sacred center that would authoritatively
regulate all societal tensions – a secularizing, centrifugal tendency of
which Gans approves). Marion, by contrast, would reinstall the sacred
center by assigning the “icon” a synthesizing, superior role in what
would other wise be a free-wheeling phenomenal interplay of history,
idolatry, and carnal experience.

Marion’s phenomenology is a productive complement to Gans’s
generative anthropology and to performatism in general. In particu-
lar, it would seem possible to make practical use of a phenomenol-
ogy of givenness by emphasizing its aesthetic, paradoxical elements
over the theological, hierarchical ones – something which is implicit
anyway in the unpredictable movement of anamorphosis upon which
Marion’s theory is based. Being Given, in any case, confirms the pos-
sibility – and necessity – of continuing the post-metaphysical project
begun in postmodernism with new, specifically monist means.
Summary
In my discussion of Gans’s generative anthropology, Sloterdijk’s

spherology, and Marion’s phenomenology of givenness I’ve tried to
dispel two widespread, mutually confirming assumptions. The first is
that the only viable kind of theory derives from the notion of sign as
something belated, uncontrollable, and split apart from its referent;
the second, that the new monist, unified concepts of sign are sim-
ply repeating old, well-known metaphysical errors. In a purely formal
sense, of course, all three monist theories do indeed start out with
poststructuralist notions of sign (or, in the case of Sloterdijk, with the
energetic-organic concept of the rhizome). The new monism however
frames and unifies these concepts in a distinctly different way that,
no matter how you twist and turn it, is no longer compatible with the
basic semiotic credo of poststructuralism. The crux of this difference
shows itself most directly in the new monism’s framed reduction to the
originary. The focus is no longer on the wildly proliferating, secondary
relations that signs indisputably enter into after they’ve been around
for a while, but on the basic – one could say a priori – conditions nec-
essary for the sign to come about in the first place. This “givenness” of
the sign (Marion), its “ostensivity” (Gans), or the “binary reciprocity”
of its creators (Sloterdijk) suggest that the creation of the very first
sign must have involved a spontaneous, object-related, inspired unity
of two human intuitions rather than an ironic, after-the-fact suspicion
that signs were being arbitrarily or deviously tacked onto some on-
tological fata morgana. While all three monist theories allow for the
possibility of deceit, resentment, or abuse after the fact, they all agree
that these aspects are secondary to the logic of the original founding
scene. And, in normative terms, all three theories agree that it is now
imperative to tap into this originary or primary scene again so that we
may renew and revitalize our attitude towards art, ethics, religion, and
reality in general. The result is a paradoxical, oxymoronic, or saturated
return to metaphysics using postmetaphysical means. This means that the
grand metaphysical postulates – presence, center, love, beauty, truth,
God etc. – all return, but only insofar as they can be apprehended as im-
manent relations. To adhere to this proof of immanence in the most
rigorous way possible is a common goal of all three theories.
The second move crucial to the new monism is the revitalized no-
tion of performance, or the move from immanence to transcendence.
The anamorphotic upsurge (Marion), the creation of new bubbles,
globes, and foams (Sloterdijk), or the leap from a horizontal to a ver-
tical plane in the originary scene (Gans) mark the transcendent striv-
ing of the human forces inside the frame, their attempt to extend their
apprehension of givenness, their creative intimacy, or their reconcilia-
tory scene to the entire world around them. The goal of performatism,
stated most simply, is to analyze this transcendent striving in the realm
of culture after the fact.
Chapter 6
Performatism in Art
Anyone following the international art scene for the last ten years
or so will have no trouble identifying developments that are difficult
to reconcile with the practice and theory of postmodern art. These
include a renewed interest in beauty and the discipline of aesthetics,
a new seriousness or lack of manifest irony, a renascence of paint-
ing (as opposed to performance art and installations) as well as the
imposition of unified authorial intent on the represented world. As
in other branches of culture, however, no critic and no artist up to
now has been willing to connect the dots, as it were, to form the
picture of a whole epoch that is opposed to postmodernism and that
is gradually beginning to replace it. In the follow remarks I would
like to show that art – no less than literature, philosophy, film, and
architecture – has entered into a stage that can best be understood
using the monist, no longer poststructuralist or postmodern concepts
of performatism.
Here as elsewhere in this book it isn’t possible to provide any-
thing resembling an exhaustive, step-by-step description of how per-
formatism took hold in the world of art. To keep the discussion to
the point, I have limited myself to five well-known artists working
in three different kinds of media: Vanessa Beecroft in performance
art, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Demand in photography, and Neo
Rauch and Tim Eitel in painting. All the artists are important figures
in their fields; all belong to a generation that came to prominence in
the mid-to-late 1990s. These artists, in spite of their seeming diver-
sity, are not pursuing idiosyncratic, unrelated styles or concepts, and
they are not merely new twists in the endlessly unfolding field of post-
modernism. Rather, they are part of a broader pattern of innovation
that is entirely in keeping with the move towards monism in the
other arts as well as in theory.
Before I start describing performatism in art, a few additional

explanations are in order. In the hypothetical originary scene as de-
scribed by Eric Gans, there are three basic positions that may be taken
in regard to the ostensive sign (which arises in intuitive mutual agree-
ment between two or more heretofore speechless protohumans and as
yet has no signified or meaning).1 If the thing is perceived as blocking
access to the transcendent, reconciliatory power of the sign, the result
is the sacral, or religion. Alternately, if the sign is perceived resentfully,
as blocking access to or obscuring the material thing, the result is the
political, or a grab for power that nonetheless still has to “go through”
the sign to get what it wants2 (the various neo-Nietzschean schemes
common to poststructuralism would reduce the sign to this function
alone). Finally, when attention oscillates between the closed unity of
sign and thing, this creates a sense of distance that allows us to experi-
ence the sign-thing relation as beautiful.
sign sign sign
thing thing thing
The Sacral The Political The Aesthetic

The thing is The sign is Attention oscillates
perceived as a perceived as a between sign and
hindrance to hindrance to ap- thing, enabling us
appropriating propriating the to achieve a distance
the transcendent immanent thing. to them and regard
sign. them as beautiful.
Performatism in Art 197
The result is a concept of art corresponding in many regards to

the definition advanced by Kant in his Critique of Judgment: the
aesthetic is below the threshold of concept (ohne Begriff ), without
interest (interesselos), necessary (notwendig), and is pleasing (erzeugt
Wohlgefallen).3 Unlike the original Kantian model, however, this sce-
nario is impervious to the kind of deconstruction practiced by Derrida
on Kant in his The Truth in Painting, which exposes the contradic-
tions arising when Kant tries to separate “pure,” disinterested beauty
from the impure, practical concepts that are needed to mediate it.4 In
the case of the ostensive sign, by contrast, all three basic modes – the
sacral, the political, and the aesthetic – are rooted in the originary rela-
tion between sign and thing and are prior to concept; the disinterested
aesthetic sign is not any “purer” than the interested approaches to the
sign beside it and is not compromised by exposure to concept.5 This
trinitarian division of labor is crucial to explaining how performatist
art maneuvers through the Scylla of high modernist Kantianism and
the Charybdis of postmodern, neo-Nietzschean irony to establish a
truly new monist mode of representing reality.
There is now a broad consensus among art critics that high mod-
ernist, non-representational art fits in well with the basic precepts of
Kantianism (as filtered through the writings of formalist critics like
Clement Greenberg).6 Modernist art operates below the threshold of
concept, abjures practicality, strives for a self-referential, formal purity
and, if it is good, imposes itself necessarily on the viewer’s intuition.
Through this self-referential search for purity, modernist art may be
said to strive for a semiotic unity of artist, work, and viewer. This kind
of art, which reached its apogee in the Abstract Expressionism of the
early 1950s, was swept away in the 1960s by what most critics now
refer to as postmodern art, or, as the case may be, anti-art. This art
is beholden to ironic conceptuality, constantly undercuts the bounda-
ries between art and practice, uses disgusting objects to discredit the
notion of essential, thing-bound beauty, and, by virtue of its unrelent-
ing irony, forces the viewer out into a vast contextual expanse from
which there is no returning to a pure, unmediated appreciation of the
art work at hand. The philosophical roots of this kind of concept or
performance art are Hegelian (its conceptual Inhaltsästhetik is directly
opposed to Kantian Formästhetik) and Nietzschean, in the sense that

the artists are constantly trying to smash through our conceptual il-
lusions by representing them ironically in deliberately flawed or repel-
lant works of anti-art. The semiotics of postmodern art are indispu-
tably dualist: value and meaning accrue to things after the fact, by
virtue of their position in a particular context.
This sweeping displacement of a monist sign and value system by a
dualist one would seem to confirm the dichotomous notion of art his-
tory championed by Heinrich Wölfflin and his followers. Moreover,
it suggests that the course of art history might one day be renewed by
a direction diametrically opposed to the semiotic dualism, insistent
irony, and ludic conceptualism of postmodernism. Unfortunately, al-
though most art critics are becoming aware that the “triumph of anti-
art” (McEvilley) has turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, there has been
no attempt to conceive of the new, pro-art trend in positive epochal
terms. Thus, even when a shrewd critic like Boris Groys (whose ideas
are treated in detail in Chapter Five) is able to conceptualize the new,
he is unable or unwilling to link that conceptualization with contem-
porary artistic practice. Similarly, a mainstream critic like Arthur C.
Danto, who moved from rejection of anti-art to grudging acceptance
and appreciation, is now once more edging towards a Kantian posi-
tion: in a recent series of lectures he concluded that beauty is an an-
thropological constant and “one of the values that defines what a fully
human life means.”7 Unfortunately, Danto is still unable to part with
a specifically Hegelian approach to art that he links with the analysis
of “embodied meaning”8 – which is to say that art or art appreciation
remains in his view a conceptual rather than an intuitive endeavor (in
the Kantian sense). My own approach takes exactly the opposite tack.
To understand the present epochal shift in art we must, I believe, jetti-
son entirely the notion of concept and return to a specifically intuitive
notion of art that is nonetheless distinct from modernist formalism or
traditional Kantianism.
The most direct way to explain how this new monism works in
art is to recur once more to the notion of the double frame, which
consists of two interlocking parts: the primary or inner frame (the os-
tensive sign) and the outer frame, or work frame. My basic assumption
– confirmed by observations in other media – suggests that contempo-

rary artists have intuitively or unconsciously turned to latter-day vari-
ants of the ostensive sign to avoid the endless regress and increasingly
strained ironies of classic postmodernism, and that they place an out-
side frame – an ironclad clamp or lock – around that sign to insure
that its aesthetic efficacy remains unbroken.
As such, the new epoch may best be defined as the becoming-
conscious of the ostensive, which up to now existed as a latent, but
unrecognized force in all culture.9 The teleological closure resulting
therefrom – the notion that the originary semiotic scene has reached
its historical fulfillment in the present epoch – is unavoidable, since
it is not possible to think outside history and anticipate what the next
epoch is going to be without having gone through this one first. In
this sense history always appears to have ended, since it’s not possible
to view history from an ahistorical, transcendental perspective.
As noted above, the ostensive sign or inner frame can be expe-
rienced in three ways: as sacred, as political, and as aesthetic. The
aesthetic is not a separate, pristine realm of its own, but arises when
someone takes advantage of a modality offered by the sign in its most
basic state. As soon as you step back to regard the sign as it oscil-
lates between being a sign and being a thing, you automatically lose
interest in instrumentalizing it for material or sacral ends. For this
reason beauty in performatism has no intrinsic formal properties ex-
cept that of closure; it arises in a reflexive, intuitive distance to the
ostensive sign, which is nothing more than a closed mental frame that
has been placed around a thing and a signifier. Performatist beauty is
not an essence, but is constructed in the intuitively experienced dis-
tance to a closed inner frame encompassing an undecidable relation
between a sign and a thing.
This postmetaphysical, relational notion of beauty-as-closure is dia-
metrically opposed to the modernist notion that beauty can be achiev-
ed by eliminating representation, promoting flatness (Greenberg) or
other wise purging the art work of “extraneous” devices. At the same
time, this concept of the aesthetic is no longer postmodern in the sense
that it accords the aesthetic a discrete status of its own, rather than
treating it merely in terms of a conceptually or ideologically guided,
anti-artistic grab for power. In performatism, then, beauty exists

necessarily, but it is a “weak,” constructed beauty whose only formal
property is that of closure.10
The second crucial element of the performatist concept of art is
that of the outer frame.11 The outer frame creates a discrete inner space
within a context and – in direct opposition to postmodern practice
– forcibly cuts that space off from the surrounding context and from
what may variously be described as conceptuality or discourse. The
result is a curious expansion of the intuitive minimal space marked
by the ostensive sign to some selected part of reality at the expense
of discourse and concept – a move that is deeply inexplicable to a
postmodernist and deeply pleasing – in the sense of Wohlgefallen – to
an performatist. In performatist art, the lock between outer and in-
ner frame creates a field of artistically imposed intuition that causes
viewers to align themselves with that intuition in a specific way – in
a performance. This forcible manipulation of the viewer within the
bounds of an intuitively constructed, closed, and categorically orga-
nized artificial field is the central device of performatist art.
Inasmuch as the outer frame is forcibly imposed from without, it
may be experienced as the sublime, intimidating product of a higher,
powerful will. This distinctly authorial or theist effect stands in direct
opposition to the deism of postmodern art, in which the authorial
position recedes in an endless mise-en-abyme of undecidable, catch-
me-if-you-can irony. In performatist art, the result is what might be
called a will to beauty rather than to power (what elsewhere in this
book I have called “Kant with a club,” or “Kant with a hammer”).12
Although there is no preexisting metaphysical guarantee that beauty
or sublimity can be achieved, the entire work is nonetheless “set” to-
wards achieving those effects, and coerces the viewer into receiving
them.
Just how do these abstractions translate into concrete works of art?
In the following analyses I’ll try to show how double framing works
in visual terms, and how certain characteristic themes and devices of
performatism are realized in contemporary performance art, painting,
and photography. My observations, incidentally, are often in agree-
ment with those made by art critics writing without any theoretical
agenda and with the self-assessments of the artists themselves. The

crucial problem as I see it is not so much to recognize individual de-
vices as to point out that artists work ing in completely different media
are involved in a larger epochal shift involving not just other artists,
but also writers, filmmakers, architects, and philosophers.
Performatist Performance Art: Vanessa Beecroft
Performatism was not conceived originally with art in mind, hence

the odd-sounding collocation in the heading above.13 However, since
performance art has become almost entirely synonymous with the
anti-art of postmodernism,14 it seems necessary to point out that there
is a performatist performance art, too.
The most striking representative of a no longer postmodern per-
formance artist that I have been able to find is Vanessa Beecroft.15
Superficially, Beecroft’s performances bear all the trappings of “clas-
sic” performance art: they are offensive or merely titillating to many
people in the general public, they don’t involve any particular skill
in the way they’re set up, and they raise doubts as to whether what
she is doing is really “art.”16 Also, Beecroft’s mildly scandalous public
behavior and well-publicized personal problems help round off the
image of the performance artist as eccentric exhibitionist,17 and her
performatively enacted themes, which include femininity, voyeurism,
and power relations, seem to place her squarely in the mainstream of
postmodern discourse.
Beecroft’s performances all follow one basic formula, with occa-
sional exceptions and minor variations. A group comprised of one sex
(usually female18) is presented to the public in a closed space to which
public access can be tightly regulated (usually a gallery, a museum, or,
more recently, upscale fashion stores). Depending on the plan of the
performance, the women range from entirely nude to entirely clothed;
Beecroft also employs body paint, wigs, makeup, and the like to al-
ter and unify their appearance. In addition, the performers are given
instructions that effectively keep them from performing. Often they
are told to stand phalanx-style for about an hour, after which they are
free to assume any position they want, as long as they do not move too
quickly or interact with the audience. The performers are normally

not allowed to speak, so that the performance remains entirely visual.
The performances are in addition rather long – about 2-3 hours – and,
by all accounts, physically and mentally strenuous for the performers.
The artist herself does not participate in any of the performances and
is often not even present when they are put on.
Given the well-known details of Beecroft’s personal life – she suf-
fers, or suffered, in any case, from an obsession with eating – it is
tempting to explain her art as an attempt to work off gender-related
pressure exerted by a male-dominated society. In fact, this victimary
posture marked Beecroft’s very first impromptu performance in Mi-
lan in 1993, where spontaneously engaged performers were meant to
interact with a diary recording her obsessive eating habits.19 Accord-
ingly, there has been no shortage of attempts to interpret her art as
a statement on gender and/or link her with postmodern artists like
Cindy Sherman, who deliberately scramble conventional markers of
masculinity and femininity in order to demonstrate the belatedness
and constructedness of gender.
If Beecroft’s art demonstrates anything, though, it is not the con-
structedness of gender, but the constructedness of sex. In fact, pro-
ceeding from the givens of her performances, it is impossible to draw
any direct conclusions about gender whatsoever.20 The only thing you
can say about her nude women is that they’re women, and not men or
perhaps hermaphrodites, and the only thing you can say about her fully
clothed men in U.S. military uniforms is that their gender orientation
– whatever it may happen to be – is entirely opaque. What Beecroft’s
performances do is to drastically cut off the performers (and herself)
from whatever social and sexual roles they might happen to have in real
life. The space of the performance is a specifically aesthetic frame con-
structed around the originary sign of the human body and excluding,
as much as possible, the social context that normally affects or “genders”
our perception of that body. Of course, this does not mean that the
outer frame excludes everything, and it does not suggest that the inner
frame around the body is constructed in an entirely natural way.
Two examples should suffice to demonstrate this. Although the
outer frame or work frame of Beecroft’s performance eliminates most
markers of social origin, there are, as a rule, always traces of outside

socialization and style – the most notable example being the sailors’
uniforms or various fashion accessories that the performers (who are
often professional models) are made to wear. Where they do appear,
the outside traces are, however, made uni-form,21 so that it becomes
essentially impossible to “perform” gender heterogeneously in the way
that someone like Judith Butler conceives it. Secondly, the body, as
the inner frame of Beecroft’s performances, has nothing essentially
natural about it. It is an originary construct particular to the per-
formance and exists as an origin only within the confines of the work
frame itself. Thus, even the presumably natural color of pubic hair is
rendered opaque in that performance where Beecroft has the models
appear with shaven pudenda and blonde wigs (VB 46). Wigs, paint,
hats, and cloth strips (in the Pontisister project22) all demonstrate the
constructedness of the origin or inner frame, even as the outer frame
shuts out context and its endlessly shifting ironies that would cause
that origin to dissipate in discourse.
Of course, it’s always possible to disregard the discreteness and par-
ticularity of the double frame and suggest, as one German art critic
did, that a performance of women clad only in pantyhose (VB 55)
would have turned out completely differently had it been put on in the
gritty Turkish quarter of Berlin rather than in the genteel ambience of
the Tiergarten district, where Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gal-
lery is located.23 This sort of criticism remains, however, entirely ex-
ternal to the performance itself, which is reduced to little more than a
device for producing different effects in different contexts (something
that, incidentally, applies indiscriminately to all works of art – and to
everything else, for that matter).
It has also been argued that the real driving force behind Beecroft’s
art is her anorexic-bulemic condition and depressive tendencies, which
are supposedly played out indirectly by the performers. This focus on
pathology, which has been developed systematically by Christine Ross
in her Aesthetics of Disengagement, is not especially compelling. While
it is undoubtedly true that the obsessiveness of the artist is forcibly
projected onto the performers, and while it is also true that the giv-
ens of the performance make them tired and uncomfortable, it is not
especially clear why the net result is a discourse of depression. The rea-
son for this curious diagnosis lies in Ross’s definition of depression as
a “dimensional state”24 rather than as a category. Although Ross con-
cedes that Beecroft’s performers “cannot be designated depressed”25
and are not “represented in a state of pathological depression,”26 she
nonetheless maintains that they “enact key scientific symptoms of de-
pressive disorders”27 in spite of this. In Ross’s typically poststructural-
ist thinking, “being depressed” is a shifting set of external symptoms
rather than a categorical state that you are “in” (baring oneself in pub-
lic in a group is presumably the last thing a clinically depressed person
would want to do). However, being “in” something – the closed work
of art – is precisely the situation of Beecroft’s performers.28 Postmo-
dern criticism of this type is still possible, as these examples show, but
it is unable to grasp these performatist performances in positive terms
or – what is even more telling – to get inside of them at all.
When you do get inside the performance – and you have to do
so to appreciate it fully – you are exposed to a specifically authorial
or theist will. This opaque, genderless will confronts viewers with a
uniquely constructed originary situation for which there is no con-
cept – no norms or previously established rules of conduct.29 As Dave
Hickey notes, “in these tableaux �i.e., in the performances, R.E.] we
are denied both the privacy of contemplating a representation and the
intimacy of participating in a real encounter.”30 In effect, the frame
of the performance forces both male and female viewers to oscillate
between a direct, physical appreciation of the women and the spon-
taneous search for a socially acceptable attitude within the frame that
is not offensive or threatening to others. This intuitive impetus, in
conjunction with the particular givens of the performance, creates a
specifically aesthetic experience, rather than an erotic or merely social
one. In daily life, this sort of thing occurs only when we are con-
fronted with what Erving Goffman calls breaking frame, which is to
say a massive breach of protocol in conventional, normed situations.31
In Beecroft’s art, by contrast, the “break” is internalized and becomes
an aesthetic paradox: it acts as an autonomous norm forcing us in-
tuitively and spontaneously to work out norms of our own that are
binding only in one particular context.32 This context, in turn, forces
pleasure upon us but – not least because of its paradoxical construc-

tion – is unable to deliver that pleasure in full. What is at stake here
is not the “failure” of this project (which in epistemological terms is
a foregone conclusion) but the communal success of the intuitive acts
of individuation resulting from it. The participants, in other words,
spontaneously form an originary, aesthetically organized community
underneath the threshold of concept, and the performers achieve a
kind of minimal individuation in spite of – or perhaps precisely be-
cause of – their isolation from discourse.33
The results of Beecroft’s performances are, as noted above, aesthe-
tically ambivalent. Although there is a distinct, almost classical will
to beauty in force (the focus on the nude body), the interplay and
oscillation between personal pleasure and spontaneously constructed
role-playing vis-à-vis others keeps a “pure,” classically Kantian appre-
hension of beauty from arising (the kind of intuitive appreciation that
Greenberg was looking for when assessing abstract painting). The aes-
thetic, in other words, is confirmed in Gans’s sense as an originary
anthropological construct and not as an ineffable anthropological es-
sence. This constructedness is, incidentally, also apparent in the cate-
gorical set-up of many of Beecroft’s performances: hair color (some-
times augmented by brightly colored wigs) and various ornaments are
used to create simple, usually color-coded categories within the per-
formances. The result is a kind of primitive Kantianism – one might
call it Kant with a fright wig – that imposes half-natural, half-artificial
aesthetic categories on viewers’ intuition.34 This intuitive, categori-
cally organized experience is not a belated effect of discourse or a set
of pathological symptoms being created under laboratory conditions.
Rather it is the direct Other of discursive experience and its immedi-
ate, implacable rival.35
Interestingly enough, Beecroft incorporates both the ostensive and
imperative mode in Gans’s sense into her art.36 This, I think, is the
best way of explaining her interest not just in scantily clad women,
but also in uniformed, rigidly posed sailors. As she herself notes of her
performances with sailors, “I wanted to see how �…] military rules of
conduct rub off on aesthetics.”37 The sailors, no less than the women,
appear here beneath the threshold of concept: in the closed space of
the museum they impose an imperative order on spectators, albeit in

an autonomous, non-practical way that visitors would otherwise not
be able to experience. The perhaps legitimate objection that Beecroft
is avoiding an ideological critique of the military by limiting herself
to a specifically aesthetic venue is however based in its most extreme
form on a notion of art that regards any autonomous and intuitive per-
sonal experience (be it of order or of anything else) as a sham to begin
with. It is however precisely within this imposed free space of auto-
nomous selfhood that the aesthetic moment resides, and it seems that
after many years of being effaced and dissipated in postmodernism it
is making a comeback of epochal dimensions.
Performatist Photography: Andreas Gursky’s Aesthetic Theism
It is no understatement to describe the changes that have occurred

in art photography over the last fifteen years as dramatic. Like the anti-
art of postmodernism, photography of the 1970s and ‘80s delighted in
freakish, unattractive themes and a seemingly amateurish mise en scène
of its material. The striking, disturbing images of Lee Friedlander, An-
nie Leibowitz, Nan Goldin, and Diane Arbus, to name just a few, may
be taken as tokens of this general tendency. In Germany, postmodern
photography found an original incarnation in the influential work
of Hilla and Bernd Becher.38 The Bechers specialized in pictures of
peripheral, unattractive industrial objects like water towers, winding
towers of coal mines, or grain silos, all of which were photographed in
the same, deadpan way from the same position against flat gray skies.
Taken alone, the pictures do not beautify the formal elements of their
quotidian subject matter (the way Edward Weston squeezed formal
beauty out of cur vaceous bell peppers). Taken together, though, they
form a discourse documenting the fascinating endless differences in
the visual language of functional architecture. Given the heritage of
German photography, it was also evident that the Bechers were doing
for industrial capitalism what August Sander once did for people with
his Stammmappen;39 they were creating a kind of systematic register
documenting individual types. The pictures also acquired an added
poignancy because many of these industrial objects were falling into
disuse or being torn down; the pictures came to document the slow
decline of an entire industrial region. The photographer was in any
case no longer a creative individual taking artsy pictures of odd or per-
haps even beautiful objects, but a kind of performance-artist-with-a-
lens organizing and presenting us a deliberately drab visual discourse
with socially critical implications.40
This discursive, anti-aesthetic approach was given a more explicit
ideological spin by Thomas Struth, a pupil of the Bechers, who in his
Unconscious Places (1987) photographed cities in the early morning
to look as if they were entirely unlived in, if not to say unlivable. It is
no accident that the vanishing lines in some of his bleak urban scenes
lead towards distant, diminutive church spires, which seem unable
to compensate in iconic terms for the desolation that the receding
perspective is coldly thrusting toward them. The dour irony of this
and similar projects by Becher pupils41 made one of the richest coun-
tries in the world appear economically stagnant and spiritually barren.
The point is not, of course, whether this pictorial analysis was true in
strict empirical terms. It did, however, reflect a widespread disaffec-
tion among intellectuals with what was perceived as a repressive state
and a self-satisfied, morally indifferent postwar society.
All this began to change sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. In hind-
sight it seems obvious that two separate developments worked together.
First, postmodernist anti-art was beginning to exhaust what seemed like
an unlimited plurality of possibilities for sawing off the branch upon
which it was sitting. Although there was no dearth of concepts to sub-
vert, the ironic gesture involved in doing so was becoming increasingly
predictable and easy to duplicate. While conceptual art did not simply
disappear overnight, there has been a noticeable tendency – particu-
larly in Germany – towards the “classic” medium of painting and away
from jumbled installations and crudely provocative performance art. Se-
condly, the rapid, revolutionary switch to a market economy in Eastern
European countries and the globalization process in general made capi-
talism – whatever one happened to think of it in political terms – into a
universal, inescapable economic and cultural reality.42
The results of both these developments converge in the pho-
tography of the West German Andreas Gursky (b. 1955). Gursky,
who was originally a student of the Bechers, began by making pho-

tos aimed at humdrum subjects and steeped in the dualist irony of
postmodernism. His Bochum, University (Bochum, Uni 1988),43 for
example, shows a university terrace with a massive, honeycombed,
poured-concrete roof that blocks off our view of the upper sky. A few
students stand scattered beneath the roof, with a natural panorama
of fields and forest faintly visible in the background haze. Another
work from this period, Ratingen (1984),44 shows a park forest road
marked with two parallel red-and-white circular traffic signs sig-
naling “no entry” to vehicles; a few visitors stand scattered around
the entry path to the forest, perhaps preparing to leave or preparing
to enter. The “message” in both cases is hard to miss. In Ratingen,
the arbitrary, doubled cultural sign (a simulacrum of itself) acts as
a barrier to a nature that acquires its “natural,” privileged position
precisely by virtue of the sign; the photograph confronts us visually
with the undecidable duality that lies at the core of all postmodernist
thought. In Bochum, University, the roof protects us – perhaps overly
so – from nature while at the same time interdicting our access to the
transcendent openness of the sky.45 Humans are indeed present, but
they seem randomly positioned and pursue no particular goals. Na-
ture, for its part, appears as a hazy promise in the background – so to
speak under erasure, both there and not there. When taken together,
Gursky’s two photographs cut us off vertically from transcendent ex-
perience and horizontally from a natural one: the photographs thrust
us back into the condition of endless, undecidable immanence that
is postmodernism.
Other early Gursky photos, however, project an openness and a
hint of transcendent experience lack ing in those of his postmodern
contemporaries. The most notable example is his 1989 color photo-
graph of a Ruhr Valley bridge (Ruhrtal), which may be said to mark
symbolically the gateway out of postmodernism and into performa-
tism. The photo shows a tiny human figure beneath a tall highway
bridge that forms a dark diagonal band running across the top of
the picture from left to right. The miniscule figure is framed by
the two tall, slender pillars of the bridge and the grass embank-
ment on which he is standing; in the background there is a flat gray
Becher-like sky. The dynamic, diagonally inclined bridge, though, is

more than just another inert industrial object waiting to be visually
archived; the open expanse of flat gray sky (which takes up most of
the picture) is more than just a neutral backdrop, and the human
figure – evidently a fisherman – seems to be caught in a state of
open potentiality rather than one of ironic undecidability.46 Ruhrtal
doesn’t contain any of Gursky’s later trademark techniques or mo-
tifs – the eagle’s-eye perspective, the digital manipulation, or the
brightly colored matrices of things, build ings, and people. However,
the picture’s evident lack of irony and its optimistic opening up of
space foreshadow the direction his no-longer postmodern aesthetic
would take in the future.
In the more recent analyses and appreciations of Gursky’s work
there is a broadly held feeling that Gursky is something other than
postmodern (and certainly no longer compatible with the aesthetic
championed by the Bechers). However, this feeling is seldom expressed
in a resolute way, and is invariably couched in terms applying well to
Gursky’s art but not to anyone else’s. In the following remarks I would
like to set forth a thumbnail sketch of Gursky’s art that will allow us
to place him not in some sort of differentially defined individual niche
after postmodernism, but in the broad context of the epochal shift
that is performatism.
My starting point is the double frame, which is to say the lock
between a theist, authorial perspective and a personal, human one.
Gursky’s pictures are normally taken from “on high” and because of
this create the effect of sublime distance to their objects (Gursky him-
self speaks of an “extra-planetary” perspective47 and notes that he is
interested in humans as a “species” in their environment and not as
individuals48). This theist perspective, which overwhelms the senses
more than it pleases them, keeps his pictures from descending into
the uncritical celebration practiced by commercial photography. The
first immediate effect of his photography is thus to totalize the things
or activities we see within a large, but highly selective frame. This
sublime totalization, however, can only function as a whole because
it is confirmed by categorical order existing at a lower, human level.
Gursky himself puts it like this:
You never notice arbitrary details in my work. On a formal

level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are wo-
ven together, determined by an overall organisational principle.
A closed microcosm which, thanks to my distanced attitude
towards my subject, allows the viewer to recognise the hinges
that hold the system together.49
Due to the high resolution of the pictures (and also to digital

manipulation) this sublime, theist perspective is anchored in sharp-
ly defined, digitally manipulated images that practically force us as
viewers to focus on small individual things and their formal, ordered
relationships – in short, to experience beauty.50 The eagle’s-eye view,
in conjunction with high resolution, an often unnaturally deep field of
focus, and brightly colored, enigmatically ordered forms encourages
us to work out intuitive categories of order which, when synthesized
in our mind’s eye, confirm the original totality confronting us in the
first place. Here, too, the effect is Kantian in the special performatist
sense I have been using all along. As Gursky says, “�…] the history
of art seems to possess a generally valid formal vocabulary which we
use again and again.”51 One must add, however, that this formal voca-
bulary is not entirely “natural” or a priori but is imposed on the viewer
through a totalizing, highly selective gaze and through digital mani-
pulation. In this performatist Kantianism, nature and art are framed
by a theist artist in such a way as to be indistinguishable – and we
wind up believing in this unity whether we want to or not.
This unity can also be seen in Gursky’s photo of a landfill (Ohne
Titel XIII, 2002) and of one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings (Ohne
Titel VI, 1997), which are simply different versions of the same thing
caught in different stages of constructedness. The drips are a kind of
garbage that Pollock deliberately placed on canvas to form random,
but beautiful patterns; the garbage in the landfill forms beautiful pat-
terns partly by chance, partly through digital manipulation by Gur-
sky. As in all performatist art, these larger frames or totalized unities
are nothing more than giant-size versions of the original ostensive
sign, which is that place where nature (the thing) and culture (the
sign) are intuitively framed for the first time through spontaneous,
mutual agreement and form a communal, divinely charged field de-

ferring conflict. Gursky’s specific feat is to position himself on the
outside of the frame, as it were, as a quasi-divine being with a total-
izing perspective that at the same time allows individual access to cat-
egorically mediated, beautiful thingness. The price of this aesthetic
theism is however that we are never absolutely sure what is real and
what has been digitally manipulated – and usually have no way of
knowing if the artist doesn’t tell us. The net result, as in all performa-
tism, is to create an artificially framed aesthetic field that we believe
in even though we are aware of the artificial, manipulative conditions
behind it.
This aesthetic theism also causes Gursky’s photographs to radi-
ate a metaphysical optimism that is entirely alien to postmodern-
ism. This is most evident in the way Gursky presents space. In the
postmodern photographs of Ruff and Struth, space – even outside,
presumably open space – is presented as claustrophobic (typical ex-
amples are Ruff ’s Haus Nr. 8 III 52 or Struth’s Shinju-ku [Skyscrap-
ers] 53). In Gursky’s art, the opposite is true. Even when Gursky in
Copan (2002) photographs essentially the same thing as Struth does
in Shinju-ku (the massive facades of ugly high-rise buildings) the var-
iegated colors and ordered patterns in Gursky’s facades work to de-
materialize their oppressive volume.54 In Gursky’s work, in fact, even
the most closed and oppressive inner space imaginable – that of a jail
in Stateville, Illinois (2002) – appears radiant and open; light shines
through the outside windows of each cell into the inner courtyard,
from whose center the picture was taken. In Foucauldian terms, this
panoptic perspective would at first seem to make the photographer
(and ourselves) complicit in the prison’s confining, punitive function.
This centering, however, can be interpreted in quite another way: it
allows us to apprehend the possibility of universal redemption for the
inhabitants of the cells, who appear framed by miniscule cubes of
light.55 The principle of spatial transcendence realized in the earlier
Ruhrtal (the tiny figure surrounded by a large open frame) is now
repeated a hundredfold in more constricted circumstances – but with
an optimistic refraction of light suggesting the possibility of indi-
vidual transcendence.
The inevitable question arises as to whether Gursky would not

do better subjecting globalization to an ironic pictorial critique of
the sort developed by Ruff, Struth, and others and also employed by
Gursky in some of his early work. These ironic techniques, as noted
above, include strategies of exposing the conceptual dualities condi-
tioning our “natural” vision and of “returning to the real” – photo-
graphing depopulated, constricted space so as to suggest oppression
and spiritual emptiness. Although it is no doubt possible to employ
these and similar techniques in a critique of global capitalism, it
would prevent us from ever capturing globalization pictorially in its
own terms, as a total phenomenon. If global capitalism really is as
spiritually empty, ugly, arbitrary, and claustrophobic as the postmod-
ern critique maintains, then it is fair to ask how it managed to un-
fold such a world-encompassing, universal dynamic in the first place.
This question, I believe, finds a more convincing answer in Gursky’s
method than in Ruff’s or Struth’s. For in Gursky’s photography we
experience the totalizing, dyna mic, over whelming effect peculiar to
globalization itself. While not “critical” in the postmodern sense that
requires us to take the position of a peripheral victim, Gursky’s work
forces us to experience a distinct sort of ambivalence regarding the
activities or things portrayed. Because totalization imposes beauty
and order on us, and because we remain aware of this circumstance
in spite of our enjoying its details, we are also forced to develop an
intuitive resistance towards it. This resistance operates not through
concept, but through the apprehension of categorical equivalencies
arising between dif ferent totalities. Taken together, the pictures of
the Kuwaiti stock exchange, the North Korean mass assemblies, and
Vietnamese basket-weaving factory (and, of course, all of Gursky’s
other photos relating to global society) form a categorical assemblage
of totalities whose imagery could be reapplied in a potentially critical,
discursive way to the reality around us. The fact that Gursky doesn’t
express this criticism himself in words is less his problem than our
own. The point is, however, that an effective critique of globalization
must first apprehend the dynamics of globalization itself in order to
counter that dynamic in an effective way. In this regard the type of
art pioneered by Gursky may indeed play an instrumental role in
future critiques of globalization that move beyond the neo-Nietzs-

chean, localized positions typical of postmodernism and prescribed
by poststructuralism.
Thomas Demand: Bracketing the Real
Perhaps the most unusual and inimitable performatist photographer

of today is the German Thomas Demand, who was originally trained as
a sculptor. Demand first painstakingly recreates scenes (usually interiors)
out of folded paper and cardboard on a 1-to-1 scale, then photographs
them with a large-format camera or films them (the model is destroyed
after the picture is taken). The large-scale pictures are in turn displayed
without frames in laminated Plexiglass on patterned backgrounds, giv-
ing the impression of being direct incisions in the wall.
From the performatist point of view, Demand’s technique may be
said to radically reduce photography to an experience of theist will-
power and originary, categorical intuition. This claim may at first
seem curious because Demand’s draws heavily on familiar media im-
ages relating to juicy, discourse-laden subjects like brutal crimes, cor-
rupt politics, and dramatic historical events – typical examples being
his Tunnel (a film moving through a life-size facsimile of the tunnel
in which Lady Diana died); Corridor (depicting the hallway where
the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer lived); or Office (showing a looted
office of the Stasi, the East German state security service). Indeed, the
standard postmodern way of describing Demand’s pictures is in terms
of the absent things that they purport to represent: they are said, for
example, to “capture moments that refer to a greater event, a before
and after.”56 Seen from this epistemological perspective, the visually
stunning, large-format pictures are mainly there to make us conscious
of a lack: “Demand’s Bathroom �a picture relating to a notorious Ger-
man political scandal, R.E.] points to the evasions and ultimately to
the failure of photography’s attempts to understand the violence be-
hind the apparent ambiguity of political life.”57
However, upon examining these photographs more closely – it
would perhaps be better to say intuitively – it becomes apparent that
we can derive them from media images only through descriptions of
their titles, which function in much the same way that the inscriptio and
subscriptio did in Baroque emblems: they ascribe meaning to what is
otherwise an inexplicably constructed, rather arbitrary looking scene. If
you did not have the subscriptio provided by Demand in his interviews,
Lady Di’s tunnel could be anyone’s tunnel; Jeffrey Dahmer’s corridor
anyone’s corridor; and the looted Stasi office anyone’s act of vandal-
ism anywhere. Demand’s constructive technique evidently disturbs the
causal connection leading from reality to the photograph so much that
it must be artificially supplemented with outside discourse58 (even the
generic titles, which in conventional terms are indisputably part of the
photograph’s presentation, don’t help much in figuring out what his
pictures are about).59 Demand’s photographs, in other words, create dis-
crete aesthetic spaces accessible primarily, if not exclusively, to intuition;
like Beecroft’s performances, they are far enough below the threshold
of concept that they must be reconnected to the practical world around
them artificially. If anything, in fact, the photographs act as indices not
of reality, but of categorical experience: the tunnel is a scene prefiguring
all threats emanating from tunnels, the corridor is any lonely person’s
corridor, the looted office any retributive act of destruction. Demand
isn’t providing us with failed representations forcing their failure upon
us after the fact; instead, he’s supplying us with a set of ostensive aes-
thetic categories that can be used by us a priori to construct or approach
quotidian reality anew. This category art is, in effect, the opposite of,
and successor to, the concept art that has dominated our aesthetic expe-
rience for the last thirty years or so.
My assessment of Demand’s art as a positive act of creation is not
alone. As Michael Fried has pointed out in an important recent ar-
ticle in Artforum, Demand’s photographs aren’t about lack or failure;
they’re about imposing the intention of the artist on the spectator. As
Fried writes, Demand tries
to replace the original scene of evidentiary traces and marks of

human use – the historical world in all its layeredness and com-
positeness – with images of sheer authorial intention, as through
the very bizarreness of the fact that the scenes and objects in
the photographs, despite their initial appearance of quotidian
“reality,” have all been constructed by the artist throws into con-
ceptual relief the determining force (also the inscrutability, one
might say the opacity) of the intention behind it.60
Translated into the epochal terminology of performatism, you

could say that the theist artist Demand occludes discourse on the level
of the sign-object or inner frame by depriving it of all but the most
minimal features necessary to make it identifiable as a real-world ob-
ject. For the viewer, the only adequate way of approaching these con-
structed minimal objects is, nolens volens, through intuition.
This intuition, however, is not indeterminate or up to the individual
position taken by the viewer, as is the case in what Fried calls minimal-
ism or literalism. Instead, Demand’s inner frames are imposed on view-
ers through the opaque will of the theist artist; the viewer experiences
the whole of the work as an uneasy mixture of beauty, uncanniness,
sublimity, and discursivity (which is tacked on, as it were, as an after-
thought by the imperfectly theist artist confirming the existence of a
world outside his own creative scene61). This “ontological project”62 as
Fried calls it, radically reverses the entire program of postmodernism.
We are no longer dealing with an anti-image demonstrating the failure
of the visual sign to represent reality, but with a unique, originary con-
struct that relocates the apprehension of reality in a “divine” aesthetic
act uniting creator, object, and viewer. And, if we inject the notion of
category into Fried’s analysis, the will of the artist can be integrated
intuitively into the consciousness of the viewer and projected back
out again onto the real world. My only real complaint about Fried’s
analysis is, of course, that he doesn’t go far enough: he explicitly leaves
the question of an epochal shift open.63 This gap can easily be filled,
though, by reference to a theory of performatism.
Performatist Painting
Arthur C. Danto’s After the End of Art (written in 1995) ends with
a discussion of the end of original style in postmodern painting. In his
remarks on the American Russel Connor and on the Russian emigré
duo Komar and Melamid, Danto notes that the task of the artist is no
longer to paint in any new style (since everything has presumably al-
ready been tried out) but to ironically juxtapose already known, mutu-
ally exclusive codes. The result is a comic art practiced by what might
best be described as highly gifted pranksters; in the case of Komar
and Melamid, for example, the performance surrounding the work
of art (“America’s Most Wanted”64) is more important than the work
itself. Faced with the imminent dissolution of art into what looks like
a running series of practical jokes, Danto retreats to an essentialist,
above-the-fray Hegelian position affirming the continued existence of
art in different historical settings. Art, which is always “about some-
thing” and always “embodies meaning”65 no matter how mundane
or trivial its subject matter may be, can do so in completely different
ways under completely different historical conditions, in accordance
with the prevailing zeitgeist. Although Danto several times invokes
the name of Heinrich Wölfflin – the scholar virtually synonymous
with an epochal concept of art history – he understandably makes no
attempt to speculate on how and when the end of art could actually
end. Art in 2005 will no doubt be completely different from what we
imagine it today, he continues, but the main thing is that it will still
be identifiable as art.66
Some twelve years later the situation in art has indeed changed in a
way that would hardly have been imaginable in 1995. There has been
a massive resurgence of paintings that are no longer comic, ironic, or
composed entirely of self-conscious citations of other styles. The most
talked-about younger artists are painters or photographers rather than
performance artists, and the art they have been producing has a feel to
it that is not readily captured using the terminology of postmodern-
ism. This development has, of course, not been lost on art critics, who
have begun to use heretofore suspect words like “ontology,” “imme-
diacy,” “beauty” or “totality” to describe the new works in a positive
way. Obviously, I have no quarrel with these assessments. However, I
would insist that the changes they describe must be treated as epochal
in nature, and not simply as incremental innovations or yet another
new proof of postmodernism’s sheer endless mutability.
This epochal perspective is Hegelian in the sense that it assumes
that art can be said to progress in diametrically opposed leaps and
bounds, and that certain types of art can appear only in certain times
or epochs. It is, however, non-Hegelian in the sense that the motor of
this progress is located in a basic, insoluble conflict between semiotic
monism and semiotic dualism and not in the zeitgeist, in shifts in
concept or style, or in a particular mode of argumentation “acciden-
tally” always favoring one side of the equation. In this regard there
can be no end of history in the Hegelian and/or postmodern sense.
The seeming “triumph” of one semiotic mode over the other inva-
riably causes its methods to congeal into conventional norms that in
time would choke off the free space that makes art what it is. The
only way out of this trap is to break with normative convention as it
stands and adopt the position of its semiotic Other. The problem we
are facing today is that art has intuitively taken this step some time
ago but art criticism has not. It is still caught up in a discourse that
can only conceive of art in terms of differential shifts within the
Same, but not in terms of a leap towards an intuitively experienced
unity of artist, work, and observer that transpires on the level of the
sign and not on the level of concept. The case of Danto shows that
even a moderate Hegelian with a soft spot for Kant isn’t going to get
us out of this posthistorical bind. For to do so, we are all going to
have to in some way become neo-neo-Kantians and semiotic monists
– at least until that posture, too, ex hausts its creative and analytical
possibilities.
Closed and Open Horizons: Bulatov, Gursky, and Eitel
The most direct way to describe the shift to monism in painting

(and painterly photography) is to show how a certain conceptualist
motif is cut off from concept and forced to float in the intuitively
perceived and categorically defined free space of the performatist
frame.
My starting point is the work of Erik Bulatov, one of the most im-
portant Russian conceptualist painters of the 1970s and 1980s. Like
the other conceptualists, Bulatov used techniques comparable to those
of Western pop-art, but with a uniquely Soviet point of reference.
His perhaps most well-known painting, Horizon (Gorizont, 1971–72),
seems at first to be done entirely in the pseudo-naturalist style of So-

cialist Realism: it depicts a group of fully clothed people on a beach
walking away from the viewer towards the ocean horizon on a bright
sunny day. A closer look reveals that the canvas is divided into four
horizontal stripes of kitschy, highly saturated color: the yellow sand
of the beach, the dark blue of the water, an abstract, broad red band
where the horizon should normally be, and the cerulean blue of the
sky. For those familiar with Soviet symbols, the red band blocking the
horizon is not just an abstraction, but is also the ribbon attached to
the Order of Lenin, one of the highest honors bestowed in the Soviet
Union. As Groys has pointed out in his Total Art of Stalinism, Bulatov
is echoing a theme of Nietzsche’s (who likens the death of God to
wiping out the horizon) as well as staging an undecidable struggle
between Socialist Realism, modernism, and official Soviet power: in
competing for power with Socialist Realism, modernist abstraction
itself becomes indistinguishable from an official insignia of power.67
The painting, in effect, exposes previous art movements as a will to
power and power as a will to art. Using a by now familiar ploy of post-
modern conceptualism, the artist occupies a liminal, shifting position
that is parasitic on the discourses he is using without being reducible
to any one of them.
Groys would however come to realize in his later essay Unter Ver-
dacht �Under suspicion, 2000] that the uncanny elusiveness and unac-
countability of the postmodern artist eventually works to revive the
notion of subjectivity itself. Since the artist has the unique power to
renew value in the cultural archive, he or she inevitably comes to be
regarded as the bearer of some sort of transcendent secret, even if – or
precisely because – the artist’s main message is that there is no secret.68
The result is what Groys calls a “submedial subject,” who operates
with consistent success below the level of concept and who because of
that attracts our envy and suspicion.
Because Groys remains rooted in postmodern skepticism, he is un-
willing to assign the submedial subject anything more the role of a
Loki – a deceitful, vaguely malevolent prankster-god. This is, once
more, entirely in keeping with a specifically Nietzschean interpreta-
tion of the sign, which sees in it only the political and sacral:
Subjectivity is always only the subjectivity of the other, who is

assumed to be behind its surface. Subjectivity is what appears
to me suspicious about someone else, what scares me – it is
what causes me to make lamentations and accusations, to as-
sign responsibility, to struggle and protest – in short, to engage
in politics. Only when a hidden God is assumed to be behind
the image of the world does one feel moved to take a political
stance.69
What Groys is unable to grasp is that the autonomous or subme-

dial space inhabited by art may also create an affirmative, constructive
projection of its own that can be imposed visually on others on its
own terms.70 In recent art, in fact, it’s possible to observe how paint-
ers working in the new monism have done just that. These artists use
strategies that dampen or defuse suspicion and create positive visual
projections within the artificially imposed, but internally free space of
intuition.
These strategies are, first of all, evident in the “painterly” photos
of Andreas Gursky already treated above. It is particularly interesting
in this regard to see what Gursky does with the horizon motif used by
Bulatov. This motif is, of course, not original to Bulatov himself. It
directly cites Socialist Realist models like Aleksandr Dejneka’s Future
Pilots (Budushchie lyotchiki, 1937) and indirectly the work of the Ger-
man Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, who likes to place observers
with their backs turned to us in front of radiant, horizontally orga-
nized seascapes or landscapes. In Friedrich’s typically Romantic pro-
jection, we are not only confronted by a sublime, numinous Nature,
but we are also made to reflect on how others reflect on that Nature.
Gursky cites Friedrich’s landscapes in several photographs,71 but
the one most relevant for this discussion would seem to be Rhein II
(Rhine II, 1999). Rhein II confronts us with a landscape that is no
less spiritualized than Friedrich’s and no less artificial than Bulatov’s.
The large-format photograph, which measures approximately 6 x 12 ft
(208 x 387 cm), consists of seven horizontal stripes: a verdant shore at
the bottom, a gray ribbon of road, more green shore, a gleaming, mer-
cury-like band of wave-rippled water, a gray strip of shore, the green
stripe of the far riverbank, and a flat, grayish-white sky above it. As
in Bulatov’s painting, we have difficulty deciding whether the photo
is entirely natural, though for different reasons. The neatly horizontal
bands of land, water, and sky appear so perfectly composed as to be
unreal, and critics have in fact associated the photograph with works
by abstract artists like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin.72 In Gur-
sky’s case, though, the effect is not one of ironic undecidability but of
a paradoxical unity prior to all concept; the viewer has little choice but
to oscillate between these two potentialities imposed on them by the
frame of the photo. The two undecidably fused poles of the natural
and the artificial are in turn augmented and intensified by the other
factors noted earlier: the sublime size of the picture; the set towards
form and order; the imposition of categorical intuition on the viewer;
and the possibility of transcending the frame of the individual picture
and reapplying its givens to other works of art or to nature itself.
Unlike the work of Friedrich and Bulatov, there is no reflection
on reflection in Gursky’s picture: nature, art, and the observer are all
bound together in a framed unity that seems to transcend, rather than
undercut, the individual premises upon which that unity is based.
And, even if we are aware that Gursky manipulated this scene (he in
fact digitally excised a factory that would probably have warmed the
hearts of the Bechers73), the effect of this epistemological insight on
our appreciation of the photograph is nil. Like gender in Beecroft’s
nude performances and media events in Demand’s architectonic pho-
tos, the building has simply been bracketed out of existence; it leaves
no traces for us to interpret. We know it is out there somewhere, but
have no way of connecting it to the photograph without the explicit
intervention of the theist artist, who “positions” us along a particular
phenomenological axis that in turn forces us to perceive the world
anew. The “suspicious” Groysian viewer must either reject the paint-
erly photo’s sublimity and beauty out of hand or try vainly to imagine
something that isn’t there – the factory that would effectively rein-
scribe the picture in “the real,” and ultimately in a particular, identifi-
able context. Suspicion without concept is, however, nothing more
than belief, and it is precisely that effect that the picture achieves: it
converts skeptics into believers whether they like it or not.
Another variant of the horizon/observer motif can be found in

the work of Tim Eitel (b. 1971), a German artist associated with
the New Leipzig School. I am not sure whether Eitel is familiar
with Bulatov, but many of his paintings appear to cite Friedrich’s
romantic scenes: naturalistically depicted people with their backs
turned towards us walk casually towards or stand in front of the
horizon of a beach or field.74 The effect achieved by Eitel lies some-
where between painting and snapshot photography, without however
suggesting photorealism. Because Eitel uses very flat, rich expanses
of monochrome paint in his depictions of nature, his pictures take
on an abstract quality in spite of their patent realism. The major
difference to Bulatov is that the coexistence of the natural and the
abstract lacks any ironic tension whatsoever. Nature appears as an
abstraction of the theist artist (who “improves” nature by making
it more monochrome, saturated in color, and homogenous than it
really is). At the same time, the monochrome abstraction is never
allowed to dominate entirely: there is always just enough detail to
keep it within the bounds of the mimetic.
This applies with no less intensity to the humans caught up in this
aesthetically simplified and beautified space. Their own emotional
state of mind remains enigmatic and opaque, either because they are
turned away from us completely or because when they face us they
seem entirely oblivious to the artist-observer.75 Although not repre-
sented in photorealistic detail, the subjects always still evince slight
traces of individual taste or character: a particular slouch, a certain
kind of handbag, a sport jacket slung over the arm in a characteristic
way. In this sense these figures are not stereotypes (as in Bulatov) or
mere conduits of Romantic reflection on the sublime (as in Fried-
rich). Against the mimetic flatness of the surroundings they stand
out as uniquely, albeit minimally, human. Eitel’s paintings of this sort
in fact radiate an enticing, irresistible combination of the theist and
the human. The observer is lured into their space by the theistically
perfected depiction of nature and by the enigmatic opacity or closed-
ness of the people within that nature – whereupon the aesthetic trap
snaps shut: you yourself enter into the intuitive space of the painting
whether you like it or not.
This theistically constructed unity of abstraction and realism is

even more pointed in Eitel’s museum paintings, in which the natu-
ralistic level of the observers seems to overlap with the abstract level
of the paintings they are looking at. In Blue and Yellow (Blau und
Gelb, 2002), as in Bulatov’s Horizon, an abstract stripe (of a black
museum railing in the picture’s foreground) runs across the breadth
of the canvas and appears at first glance to be on the same plane as
the Mondrian painting behind it. However, the disruptive illusion
disappears quickly when one notices that a human observer is stand-
ing between the artificial monochrome lines of the painting and the
real, monochrome line of the railing. In Gans’s generative anthropolo-
gy the human is defined precisely as the ability to distinguish between
the real as mediated by the sign and the sign itself; in Blue and Yellow
it is a human subject that allows us to make precisely this distinction
in regard to a pictorial representation. Eitel’s museum paintings may
thus best be described as performative, second-degree representations
of the originary, paradoxical aesthetic situation. They create a visual
outer frame that forces the observer to participate in the peculiarly hu-
man oscillation between signs and thingness that is represented in the
inner frame of the painting; what is represented in the inner frame by
the artist is performed by the viewer in the outer one. Painter, viewer,
and painting all converge within the bounds of one closed frame.
A die-hard postmodernist would no doubt object that Eitel’s hu-
man figures are trapped helplessly between the representation of the
real and the representation of the abstract. However, this sort of “sus-
picious” interpretation must pointedly ignore the placidly opaque
demeanor of the subjects involved. Although in a certain sense they
really are trapped in the aesthetic space between the real and the sign,
they seem neither to enjoy nor to suffer from their predicament: they
are suspended, as it were, in an ostensive, originary mode of complete
potentiality and don’t appear to suffer unduly because of it.76 The only
way to “get behind” their opacity and “get back” to discourse would
be to excise the human from the paintings entirely – a move that is
however external to the works themselves and that would, in essence,
destroy them.
The Aesthetic Workshop of Neo Rauch
One of the main conceits of Russian conceptualism was that capi-

talism and socialism were essentially the same – both were equally
unfree, but capitalism was simply materially better off, and hence less
cognizant of its own illusions. As Bulatov himself recently put it, “In
the West there is no freedom either, just its semblance. There is no
difference between Soviet and Western unfreedom. Genuine freedom
is a rupture �proryv] running through social reality.”77 In this way of
thinking (which is of course not all that much different from West-
ern conceptualism) only the neo-Nietzschean artist has the power to
subvert the illusions of both systems by enacting the kind of ironic
conundrums described above, which force us to assume a position of
otherness vis-à-vis prevailing codes and experience a liminal, tenuous
kind of freedom within the cracks opening up in the dominant cul-
ture. The fall of communism, however, wasn’t just another reshuffling
of already familiar concepts. The socio-economic system called capi-
talism became a universal reality, whereas its chief rival, communism,
entered into the realm of the unreal – it simply ceased to exist as a
physical entity.
The disappearance of their brand of conceptual “unfreedom” into
an ontological black hole provoked dif ferent reactions among artists
from the former Soviet bloc. While it’s not possible here to go into all
individual variants, one can speak of three general tendencies. The
first might be called art – or business – as usual. Bulatov, for example,
continued to work in a similar fashion as before, for example, by plac-
ing diagonally receding three-dimensional slogans in front of natural
backgrounds (a citation of a Russian avant-garde technique that is
lost on most Westerners; see his Freedom is Freedom I �2000]). As the
critic Vladimir Tupitsyn has pointed out, these new paintings lack
the ironic bite of Bulatov’s Soviet work; they appear more like flashy
advertising images than the neo-Nietzschean commentary on capi-
talism they are no doubt intended to be.78 Others, like Komar and
Melamid, who emigrated earlier, had less problems adapting and, as
noted above, became adept at turning Western marketing techniques
into both tools and targets of their conceptual irony.
A second tendency is what Hal Foster has called “the return of the
real,”79 and which is often thought to be typical of postmodern art in
the 1990s. In the Russian context, this applies to anti-artists like Alex-
ander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and the photographer Boris Mikhailovich.
These artists may be said to take the materiality of the art work liter-
ally; they destroy other people’s art works (Kulik), physically attack
observers during performances (Brener), or present the real as abject
and debased (Mikhailovich). This kind of art rubs our noses in the
material existence of the real while conceptually confirming the im-
possibility (or undesirability) of actually ever appropriating it. In Groy-
sian terms, these artists, driven by an intense, conceptually guided sus-
picion of the motives of art in general, deliberately try to destroy the
materiality of art to “get at” its submedial or ontological source, which
(as they are well aware) is reducible neither to materiality nor to con-
ceptuality. Unfortunately, an art that can only approach the real by
destroying it or highlighting its repellant character remains trapped
forever in the dualism of late postmodernism, which derives a kind of
perverse, endless pleasure from experiencing the proximity of the real
on the one hand and the impossibility of ever appropriating it on the
other. And indeed: the pro forma recognition of the real achieves noth-
ing if the real cannot be experienced as a unity with the sign that rep-
resents it. Only this performatist, monist framing, which necessarily
takes place below all concept, can in the long run renew today’s art.
There are, however, also specifically performatist, non-conceptual
reactions to the disappearance of socialism. The best example of this
can be seen in the work of Neo Rauch (b. 1960), who is a product of
the academic East German art system and came to prominence only
after the fall of Communism. Unlike the many East European art-
ists who juxtapose two or more readily identifiable, but incompatible
cultural codes in a state of undecidable conceptual irony, Rauch has
developed a representational mode of painting that operates entirely
below the threshold of concept and cannot be reduced to an ironically
conceived stand-off between Eastern and Western discourses.
Rauch’s work however also differs from the other performatist art-
ists discussed above because he strives neither for thematic unity nor
does he work with simple, intuitively recognizable categories that are
“naturally” accepted by viewers. In fact, his paintings seem to do pre-

cisely the opposite: they contain a plethora of irritatingly incongruous
figures, styles, actions, colors, and objects. A typical (comparatively
simple) example is Pfad (The Path, 200380), which contains three gar-
ishly colored, out-of-scale figures (two male, one female) that look like
they have been pasted onto a monochrome, half-finished blue back-
ground. On this background we see a path leading up to a modernist
house on a hill; oddly standing trees, a basket of mushrooms and what
looks like an agave plant border the path, which is marked by a multi-
colored logo reading “Path.” The figures carry odd objects, including
a shiny green serpent-like staff, a purse, a pair of branch clippers, and
a liquid-look ing green knapsack. Two yellow tubular bars, placed in a
triangular formation and having no apparent function, seem to merge
with the woman’s blouse. The figures are expressionless and seem in-
tent on doing something – it is just not clear just what. The one male
figure wears a long, split-tailed cloak that might be from the nine-
teenth century; the other is dressed like a worker, and the woman in
a 1950s style dress and blouse. There is no unity of time or place, and
there is no sense that all this has been achieved through the synthetic
vision of the subconscious (as is the case in true surrealism). More
specifically, we have the apprehension of a distinctly theist, “outside”
artist who inserts things into a frame (hence the collage-like figures)
and who hasn’t entirely completed the work at hand.
Although the different styles used by Rauch can be traced back
to such sources as comic books, East German propaganda art, sur-
realism, and modernism, they don’t compete with one another for
dominance the way they do in conceptualism. The reason for this is
that Rauch’s paintings are devoid of any narrative and conceptual pur-
posefulness. This quality, which has been noted by numerous com-
mentators, is formulated most forcefully by Bernhart Schwenk, who
stresses the self-referential qua lities of Rauch’s paintings:
Neo Rauch is no teller of tales, even if he works with narrative

elements and motifs. Rather, his pictures are still-lifes, symbols
of picture-making; he creates, as it were, an emblemology of
painting. To experience his pictures thus, the observer must
free himself or herself from the compulsion to read a story into

them, from the urge to decipher their meaning. �…] If the ob-
server succeeds in avoiding this trap, the pictures reveal a broad
and variegated visual code. Although springing from personal
and historical experience, they are self-sufficient creations,
metaphorical constellations. They create an exterior framework
for a more profound content whose significance stretches far
beyond the bounds of art.81
In performatist terms, Rauch can be said to create a peculiar inner

space that generates neither meaning nor narrative but rather only aes-
thetic “work” on the part of the observer; it is only this magical, pur-
poseless task that can transcend the jumbled and incongruous givens of
the painting. The net effect is that of aesthetic hard labor. The observer
is encouraged to work, however this work takes place in a purposeless
space using signs that have minimal discursive meaning and minimal
ties to reality. This type of labor radicalizes the categorical procedures
of performatist art discussed earlier by creating what seem to be idio-
syncratic categories and by denying unity at the thematic level. The
result is a complex, “saturated” kind of categorical intuition that makes
the outside world of discourse seem drab by comparison. Moreover,
this inner world becomes the place where history, which has imploded
and ceased to develop in both discursive and real terms, is intuitively
restarted through the exertions forced upon us by Rauch’s art. Rather
than dwelling in endless, belated irony, the theist artist tries to restart
time using the meaningless, but nonetheless somehow significant frag-
ments of the past and the subconscious to create a perpetually active
present. Because it is not anchored in any particular discourse, it allows
both Ossis and Wessis – East and West Germans alike – to take part in
it on an equal footing. The result is a unified, East-West aesthetic con-
sciousness that would not be possible in discourse.
Concluding Remarks
Performatism in art is not a programmatic movement,82 a style, or

a moral posture (it does not derive its legitimacy from postmodernism
being “bad,” “immoral,” or “arbitrary”). Rather, performatism marks

a positive, specifically historical, across-the-board shift to monism in
different media and in works of art having otherwise little or noth-
ing in common in the way of subject matter, motifs, or technique.
The problem is not so much that contemporary critics have failed
to grasp the innovative achievements of individual artists or works
of art. There are, as we have seen, numerous perceptive, trenchant
analyses of the new, no longer postmodern aesthetic, and there is a
widespread feeling that postmodernism is, for better or worse, on its
way out. Nonetheless, critics are still loath to take the next logical
step and treat these innovations as part of an historical epoch that
is irreducible both to postmodernism and to any one of the old mo-
nisms like classicism, neo-Kantianism, or the Apollonian. The rea-
sons for this hesitation are in human and institutional terms entirely
understandable. For the only way to understand the new epoch from
within – from its own position – is to jettison practically every thing
that critics have accumulated up to now in the way of analytical and
theoretical tools and start again from scratch within the new monist
mindset. Unfortunately, there is no way to get around this specifically
historical, self-transcending kind of performance. Any reapplication
of postmodern concepts to explain postmodernism’s historical Other
will simply result in a further reification of postmodernism.
Whether the tag “performatism” will ever be adopted as a name
for the nascent epoch is, of course, impossible to say; in a certain
sense it is not even crucial to my project. However, there can be little
doubt that the things described by performatism – the authorial or
theist perspective, the artificial, forced construction of unities, the use
of categories rather than concepts, and the set to unified, ostensive
signs – are right now the main sources of innovation in contemporary
culture and will remain so for some time. What is needed now most
in the world of art criticism is a peculiar conflation of Wölfflinian
and Nietzschean virtues: the ability to think in historical, epochal
dichotomies and the courage to smash through accustomed patterns
of discourse and reenter history via the new monism.
Notes
Notes to Introduction
1. “Mapping the Postmodern,” New German Critique 33 (1984),

5-52.
2. See the illustration in Chapter Four of this book, 154.
3. Typical of the prevailing attitude in academia is the collection
Beyond Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture,
ed. by Klaus Stierstorfer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). Most of
the book is devoted to critical reassessments of postmodernism that
do little more than project postmodernism back onto itself using
poststructuralist methodology. A small number of the authors (most
notably Ihab Hassan and Vera Nünning) discuss unpostmodern
trends toward subjectivity, faith, aesthetics, and ethical solidarity in
an approving way. None of them, however, is willing to conceive of,
let alone name, an epoch that would lie beyond postmodernism.
4. The notion that literary history is determined by two opposing,
alternating styles is of course not new. The tradition I am following can
be traced back to such authors as Heinrich Wölfflin in Renaissance and
Barock (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1966 �orig. 1888]) and Ernst
Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(New York: Pantheon, 1953). In Slavic studies, the influential notion
of a “primary style” versus a “secondary style” was first suggested by
Dimitrii Likhachev in Razvitie russkoi literatury X-XVII vekov. Epokhi i
stili �The development of Russian Literature from the 10th to the 17th
century. Epochs and styles] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973) and developed
in semiotic and semantic terms by Renate Döring-Smirnov and Igor
Smirnov in their Ocherki po istoricheskoi tipologii kul’tury: ...realizm – (...)
– postsimvolizm (avangard) �Outline of a historical typology of culture:
...realism (...) postsymbolism – (the avant-garde)] (Salzburg, 1982).
Within Slavics itself there has been no particular interest in applying
epochal models to the cultural development after postmodernism.
5. See Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess. Deconstruction in Eclipse
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
6. Obviously, the term isn’t to be confused with performance the
way that Judith Butler or other contemporary theorists use it. The
postmodern performance is by definition weak, split, and doomed to

failure before it even starts; the subject in such conceptions is little
more than a belated effect of circumstances far exceeding its control.
7. Though based on Gans’s notion of the ostensive, the concept of
performatism was developed independently of Gans’s own epochal no-
tion of post-millennialism, which first appeared in his internet journal
Chronicles of Love and Resentment, No. 209, 3 June 2000 under the
title “The Post-Millennial Age” (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/
vw209.htm).
Notes to Chapter 1
1. See his The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1987), esp. 37-82.
2. In this sense, performatism is the opposite of the phenomenological
epokhē. Phenomenology brackets things to know them better; perfor-
matism brackets things to believe in them better. For more on this see
the discussion of Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given, Chapter Five in this
book, 175-193.
3. The most recent book-length formulation of this theory is Gans’s
Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); see also his Originary
Thinking. Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford
University Press 1993) as well as the numerous glosses and additions
in his internet journal Chronicles of Love and Resentment at
www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/home.html
4. See, for example, René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation
of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 7-9.
5. Gans suggests in his Originary Thinking that while the idea of God
may be forgotten as society becomes more secular, “the process of this
forgetting can never be concluded. Even if someday not one believer
remains, the atheist will remain someone who rejects belief in God,
not someone for whom the concept is empty” (42-43).
6. See his discussion, for example, in Originary Thinking: “The plea-
sure of the esthetic results from the deferral or ‘drowning’ of the prior
displeasure – the resentment – generated by unfulfillable desire. The
esthetic experience engages the subject in a to-and-fro movement of
imaginary possession and dispossession that blocks the formation of
Notes 231
the stable imaginary structure of resentment, where the self on the pe-
riphery is definitively alienated from the desired object at the center”
(118-119).
7. The deconstructionist argument about language origin only works
if you assume the existence of binary categories prior to language.
Compare Jonathan Culler’s explanation of this in his On Deconstruc-
tion. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1982): “If a cave man is successfully to inaugurate language
by making a special grunt signifying ‘food,’ we must suppose that the
grunt is already distinguished from other grunts and that the world has
already been divided into the categories ‘food’ and ‘non-food’” (96).
�The italics are my own.] Culler’s explanation suggests two models of
language origin. In the first, which is absurd, language would origi-
nate through a process of infinite regress. Originary language would
be preceded by a still more originary language and so on and so forth.
In the second, which is entirely plausible, the dif ferentiation already
exists in human cognition, where it so to speaks sits around waiting
for a linguistic correlate to express itself. Unfortunately, this argument
is no longer deconstructive, since it assumes the existence of a sig-
nified already existing in human consciousness before the signifier.
What is really undecidable here is not the origin of the sign itself
(which cannot be known) but whether there is a pre-existing “set” in
human consciousness towards treating signs and things as unities or
dualities. The entire history of culture suggests that both, in fact, are
possible, and that the competition between both possibilities is the
basis of cultural history.
8. For paleoanthropological arguments see Gans, Chronicle No. 52,
“Generative Paleoanthropology,” 27 July, 1996 (www.anthropoetics.
ucla.edu/views/view52.htm). Gans’s hypothesis is also compatible with
Mircea Eliade’s more general observation that religions must be found-
ed in a sacred, holy place at the center of the world. See his The Sacred
and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (San Diego: Harcourt, 1987).
9. Alan Ball, American Beauty (New York: Newmarket Press), 60.
10. Ball, American Beauty, 60 and 100, respectively.
11. Ball, American Beauty, 60.
12. For more on how the victimary mechanism operates in a religious
context see Girard, Things Hidden, esp. Chapter 1, “The Victimage
Mechanism as the Basis of Religion” (3-47).
13. See also Chapter Three in this book, 97.

14. See his Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).
15. The classic example of “keying” is the set of signals that trans-
forms fighting into playing for animals (see Frame Analysis, 40-82).
16. Randal Collins, “Theoretical Continuities in Goffman’s Work,” in
Erving Goffman. Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. by Paul Drew and
Anthony Wooton (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 51.
17. Frame Analysis, 21.
18. Frame Analysis, 28-30.
19. Frame Analysis, 31-37.
20. The surprisingly good fit between Gans’s and Goffman’s theories
is undoubtedly a result of their common Durkheimian heritage. For
more on Goffman’s indebtedness to Durkheim see Collins, “Theo-
retical Continuities”; for more on Gans’s own positive appraisal of
Durkheim see his “The Sacred and the Social: Defining Durkheim’s
Anthropological Legacy,” Anthropoetics 1 (2000) (www.anthropoet-
ics.ucla.edu/ ap0601/durkheim.htm).
21. For more on this see Collins, “Theoretical Continuities,” 59-60.
22. Frame Analysis, 1.
23. Cf. Goffman, Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
(New York: Pantheon, 1967), esp. “The Nature of Deference and De-
meanor,” 47-95.
24. Interaction Ritual, 95.
25. Based as it is on mutually held projections, the Durkheimian
tradition is anathema to rigorous deconstructionists as well as other
strains of poststructuralism drawing on the illusion-bashing philoso-
phy of Nietzsche. Derrida’s own send-up of the Durkheimian pro-
jection – his critique of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift – can be found in
in Chapter Two of his Given Time. 1: Counterfeit Money (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also the discussion of how
Jean-Luc Marion reverses this criticism in Chapter Five, 178-182 in
this book.
26. According to Girard’s scapegoating mechanism, a collective works
off its mimetically generated tension by lynching an arbitrarily chosen
victim, who is then deified after the fact as the group’s saviour. In
the case of The Celebration the scapegoating mechanism has a moral,
rather than simply an energetic origin because the expulsion of the
Notes 233
father is justified. Here as in many other cases in performatism, an

archaic or originary scene returns outfitted with a constructed, mod-
ern-day rationale.
27. This occurs in the black comedy Dogma, in which two angels
decide to return a God(dess) played by Alanis Morissette.
29. See the classic discussions in Jacques Lacan, “The Split between
the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis (New York: Norton, 1981), 67-78 and Michel Foucault, Disci-
pline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, Vintage Books,
1995), esp. “Panopticism,” 195-230.
30. For more on this see Eric Gans’s neoconservative critique of what
he calls “victimary politics,” e.g., in Chronicle Nr. 257, “Our Neo-
Victimary Era,” 2 March 2002
(www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/ vw257.htm)
31. New York: Penguin, 2001.
32. His reading material towards the end of the movie includes Fran-
kenstein, suggesting that he is aware of his own monstrosity.
33. Here as elsewhere I’ve adopted the narratological terminology de-
veloped by Franz Stanzel in A Theory of Narrative (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984). Stanzel’s opposition of authorial/fig-
ural is best suited to describing the homologous relationship between
a theist (authorial) creator/creatrix and his or her human (figural) cre-
ations. Stanzel himself excludes first-person authorial narration from
his well-known tripartite classification scheme.
35. I have treated Atonement briefly in “Originary Aesthetics and the
End of Postmodernism,” The Originary Hypothesis: a Minimal Propos-
al for Humanistic Inquiry, ed. by Adam Katz (Aurora, Colo.: Davies
Group, 2007), 59-82.
36. “Buben nizhnego mira” in Viktor Pelevin, Sochineniya v dvukh
tomakh. Tom I. Buben Nizhnego Mira (Moscow: Terra, 1996), 362-
366.
37. “Buben,” 366.
38. In his collection A Werewolf Problem in Central Russian and Other
Stories (New York: New Directions, 1998).
39. In his collection The Blue Lantern and Other Stories (New York:
New Directions, 1997), 21-62.
40. For more on these terms as used by Jean-Luc Marion, see Chapter
5, 175-193.
41. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin. Being the Recently Discovered
Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (New York:
Random House, 1980), XIII.
42. See the discussion in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Sub-
version of Identity (New York : Routledge, 1990), 23-24.
43. In postmodern literature, this principle is exemplified best in
Sasha Sokolov’s hilarious novel Palisandriia (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1985), in which the hero, after a life of wild sexual and social trans-
gressions, discovers at the end of the book that he was really a her-
maphrodite all along.
44. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002.
45. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003 �Polish orig.
1998].
46. New York: Knopf, 2000.
47. See his Topologie der Kunst (Munich: Hanser, 2003), where he
ducks the issue completely.
48. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 182. For a further discussion of Michaels’ anti-
theory see Chapter Five, 162-164.
49. Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 20.
50. See in particular Derrida’s “Some Statements and Truisms about
Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small
Seisms,” in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse,
ed. by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
63-94; here 65.
51. See his “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives),” Diacritics 2 (1984), 20-31.
52. See his Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1982).
53. First introduced in Chronicle Nr. 209, 3 June 2000, “The Post-
Millennial Age” (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ views/vw209.htm).
Gans develops a systematic epochal concept of history prior to post-
millennialism in Part Two of his Originary Thinking, 117-219.
54. The flflip
ip side of the coin is that deist time can also end apocalypti-
cally – see Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” or Leibniz’s asser-
Notes 235
tion in Monadology § 6, that the monads can only be created or be

destroyed in one fell swoop (“tout d’un coup”).
55. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1989), 40.
56. Cinema 2, 40.
57. Cinema 2, 41.
58. For more on this concept, which has been suggested by Jean-Luc
Marion, see Chapter Five, 198-200.
59. For more on this architectonic concept see Chapter Four, 139.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. London: Penguin, 2001.

2. Hotel World, 181.
3. Hotel World, 30 and 237.
4. Granta 72 (2000), 35-54; Polish original “Numery” �Num-
bers] (1989), cited according to Tokarczuk’s story collection Szafa
(Wałbrzych: Ruta 1998), 10-39. Page numbers refer respectively to
the English and Polish editions.
5. “Hotel Capital,” 35/10.
6. “Hotel Capital,” 35/10-11.
8. See also Chapter Five in this book, 168-175.
9. See his Sphären I. Blasen �Spheres I. Bubbles] (Frankfurt a.M:
Suhrkamp, 2000), esp. the introductory chapter “Die gehauchte
Kommune,” 17-82.
10. The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (San Diego:
Harcourt, 1987), 22.
11. The Sacred and the Profane, 21.
12. The Sacred and the Profane, 63.
13. See in this regard Gans’s interpretation of Kant in terms of gen-
erative anthropology in his “Originary and/or Kantian Esthetics,”
Poetica 35 (2003), 335-353: “The ultimate source of our pleasure in
the ‘formal finality’ of aesthetic representation is not our ‘cognitive
faculties’ but our intuition that the community’s shared participation
in this finality or representational intentionality will protect us from
mimetic violence. The aesthetic performs a function analogous to that
attributed by Durkheim to religious ritual: it reinforces our solidarity
with the sacred center and, through its mediation, with our fellow
members of the human community” (344).
15. See the classic phrasing in § 22 of his Critique of Judgment. Kant,
of course, suggests that this “necessity” is an expression of absolute
cognitive freedom and does not consider the force that the text exerts
upon the reader.
24. Sphären I, 40.
25. Sphären I, 42.
26. Sphären I, 46.
27. In the last volume of his philosophical trilogy Sphären �Spheres]
Sloterdijk uses the ungrammatical metaphor of “foams” (“Schäume”)
to describe the inner experience of a modern life “developing in a
multi-focal, multi-perspectival and heterarchical way” (Sphären III.
Schäume �Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004], 23). “Foams” serve as
a post-metaphysical emblem of heterogeneous interiority and dyadic
bonding as it occurs in modern and postmodern culture. For more on
Sloterdijk see also Chapter Five in this book, 168-175.
28. In the case of Tokarczuk, these regulations are almost certainly
derived from C.G. Jung’s teachings on dreams and archetypes as well
as from Mircea Eliade’s studies on religion; readers familiar with Pol-
ish can check up on this for themselves in Tokarczuk’s essay Lalka
i perła �The doll and the pearl] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
2001) and her interview in Stanisław Bereś’s Historia literatury polskiej
w rozmowach XX-XXI wiek �A history of Polish literature of the 20th
and 21st centuries in interviews] (Warsaw: WAB, 2002), 493-526. In
the former book, an essay on Prus’s realist classic The Doll, Tokarczuk
borrows the concept of a higher quasi-divine ego or “observer” from
Jung; the observer encompasses the authorial ego and influences it in
a symbolic way that cannot be reconstructed rationally (16-18). The
Notes 237
chambermaid, so one must assume, is a personified instrument of the

author, who is in turn guided by this higher, originary, and apriori
source. In this regard it is significant, as Sloterdijk has pointed out in
a different context, that Jung’s “observer” is derived from a tradition
encompassing both the tutelary gods of antiquity and Kant’s transcen-
dental formula “I think” (see Sphären I, 426 and 454).
38. “Hotel Capital,” 41/19. The emendation is my own: “prehistory”
was left out of the English translation.
39. “Hotel Capital,” 53-54/38. The Polish Bible translation is much
more emphatic; the last phrase reads: “And God will restore that
which is past.” �R.E.]
40. Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2002.
41. Life of Pi, 69.
42. Gans coined the term in The Origin of Language (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1981); for his most recent definition of
the term see Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic
Structures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
43. Cf. Gans, Signs of Paradox: “The truth of the originary sign is the
birth of the human. The sign is what protects the human community
against its potential self-annihilation in mimetic conflict. In the face
of this danger, its truth as a gesture of representation rather than a ge-
sture of appropriation is not a foregone conclusion. It is only because
the members of the originary community accepted this truth as the
revelation of central Being that we are here to speculate about it. They
drew back from conflict because they were able to interpret their own
acts not as spontaneous movements toward the center but as ostensive
signs designating the agent that prevented this movement” (53).
44. The book leaves the question of whether there really is a God
open by resorting to the Cabbalistic doctrine of Tsimtsum, in which
God creates the world and retracts back into Himself (the Japanese
ship carrying Pi and his family is named “Tsimtsum” and Pi himself
studies the Cabbala). The doctrine suggests that there is a single ori-
gin but that we simply have no way of corroborating it anymore.
45. In this sense performatism reverses the basic procedure of the phe-
nomenological epokhē: a situation is bracketed so that we experience
beauty instead of acquiring knowledge. For more on Jean-Luc Mar-
ion’s new monist use of bracketing in phenomenology, see Chapter
Five, 193-194.
46. While performatism is an epochal, and not a general theory of
literature, it is in keeping with the growing relevance of theories con-
cerned with aesthetics, ethics, and positive reader response rather than
with linguistic or epistemological misprision. For more on this turn in
literary theory see Winfried Fluck, “Fiction and Justice,” New Literary
History 34 (2003), 19-42.
47. In other words, it does the opposite of the Derridean frame, which
mediates in an undecidable way between inside and out. For a further
discussion of the frame in performatism, see Chapter One, 2-8.
48. As Eric Gans points out in his “Originary and/or Kantian Aes-
thetics,” “the pleasure in the moment of sharing exists only against
a constantly renewed background of ‘painful’ desire that Kant does
not mention”; hence the aesthetic experience “can best be conceived
in Kantian terms as an oscillation between the pleasure of beauty and
the pain of sublimity” (343). Performative texts in effect guarantee
this oscillation by placing around a beautiful center coercive, “pain-
ful” frames that remind the reader of the limits of beauty while at
the same time making the experience of beauty possible in the first
place.
49 London: Picador, 1999; German original: Simple Storys (Berlin:
Berlin Verlag, 1998). Page numbers refer respectively to the English
and German editions.
50. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York:
Vintage, 1989), 37-45.
51. This applies above all to stories written before the collection Ca-
thedral, which is widely thought to mark a turn towards optimism in
Carver’s work.
52. This apprehension of menace is in fact often mentioned in con-
nection with reader reactions to Carver’s fiction, and it would seem to
Notes 239
account for a good deal of its success with upscale readers; see in this
regard Adam Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), 22-
23.
53. Presumably, Schulze was aware that “Sacks” is a heavily trimmed-
down version of Carver’s story “The Fling,” which uses the same plot
but supplies much more detail. In “The Fling,” for example, we learn
that the cuckolded husband committed suicide in a particularly pain-
ful way.
54. What We Talk About, 37.
55. Simple Stories, 86/102.
59. In Carver’s story, it is the adulterous wife who gets religion at an
expedient moment: “She got down on her knees and she prayed to
God, good and loud so the man would hear” (45); in “The Fling,” the
cuckolded husband goes so far as to commit suicide.
66. London: Flamingo, 1997.
67. See such polemical non-fiction works as The Cost of Living (Lon-
don: Flamingo, 1999), Power Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: South End
Press, 2001), and War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press,
2003).
68 Spivak fifirst
rst used the concept in her article “Deconstructing His-
toriography,” (orig. 1985); cited according to The Spivak Reader (New
York: Routledge, 1996), eds. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean,
203-235, esp. 214-215.
69. Spivak, who mixes Marxism and deconstruction, eventually
stopped using the term herself, which she said “simply became the
union ticket for essentialism” (see the interview with her in Boundary
2, 20:2 �1993], 24-50; here: 35). As Boris Groys points out in his
witty essay Unter Verdacht �Under suspicion] (Munich: Hanser 2000)
this poststructuralist obfuscation of subjectivity eventually leads to its
restitution. The less we have a handle on what the agent or subject is

up to, the greater is our suspicion that he or she is really there – and
pulling off something devious behind our backs (29-43). For more on
Groys’s theory of suspicion in the media see also Chapter Five in this
book, 164-168.
70. “The End of Imagination,” in The Cost of Living, 144.
71. “The End of Imagination,” 145.
72. “The End of Imagination,” 159.
73. The two characters, in other words, combine appealing physical
qualities with the status of social otherness. For an incisive reinter-
pretation of Kant’s concept of beauty as one of otherness see Tobin
Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” Philosophy and Literature
1 (1998), 31-50. According to Siebers, this focus on beauty-as-other-
ness need not be unpolitical: “Admittedly, beauty provokes otherness
on a small scale – a human scale in fact – but perhaps this is where
otherness has the greatest political value, since the small scale forces
individuals to confront otherness within their world rather than refer-
ring it to an external reality” (37). Roy takes this a step further: at
some point, her beauty-as-otherness turns into sameness by allowing
an identification across all boundaries of culture and ideology. The
“God of small things” – the God of sublimity and beauty – is a global
One.
74. God of Small Things, 327.
76. As Eric Gans has pointed out repeatedly in his internet Chronicles
of Love and Resentment, postmodernism’s focus on decentered oth-
erness (as opposed to utopian master narratives) leads to an ethical
mindset privileging peripheral victims. From Gans’s neoconservative
point of view, this attitude is productive in its rejection of centralized
authoritarianism but unproductive in its reliance on resentment. Roy
certainly wouldn’t agree with Gans’s notion that we should all warmly
embrace global capitalism and bourgeois democracy, but her position is
consistent with Gans’s in that it stresses reconciliation, love, and beauty
– and a break with the guilt-producing mode of victimary discourse.
For more on this see also the discussion of The Reader further below.
78. God of Small Things, 333-334.
Notes 241
80. This universalist pretension has been noted by numerous authors.

For those still obligated to postmodern norms this can only appear as
a sellout: Marta Dvorak, for example, in her article “Translating the
Foreign into the Familiar: Arundhati Roy’s Postmodern Sleights of
Hand,” in Reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, ed. by
Carol and Jean-Pierre Durix (Dijon: Editions universitaires de Dijon,
2002), 41-61, criticizes Roy for addressing not her “own community
but an allogenous one” and for engaging in a “dynamics of domestica-
tion and familiarisation” (61) rather than playing up the non-recipro-
cal otherness of her own cultural experience.
81. See his article “Our History,” diacritics 3 (1990), 97-115, esp.
105.
82. Gans describes this postideological scenario in the following way
(“On Esthetic Periodization,” Chronicles of Love and Resentment 258,
March 23, 2002, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw258.htm):
“Where modernist politics is cruel, postmodern politics is victimary.
Its scenic imagination, haunted by the image of victimization, con-
ceives an ideal scene without a sacred center, where all is periphery.
�...] Postmodern politics has an infinity of tasks; it sees every form
of human relation as at least potentially victimary. Where the post-
modern esthetic shies from constructing a center, postmodern politics
finds in every mode of human interaction a center to deconstruct,
construed as the locus, not of sacrifice, but of power.”
83. As Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it in his La Fiction du Politique.
Heidegger, L’art et la politique (Paris: Bourgois, 1987), the Holocaust
is, regarding the West, the “terrible revelation of its essence” (“L’Ex-
termination, est à l’égard de l’Occident la terrible révélation de son
essence” �63]).
84. See Eric Gans, Chronicles of Love and Resentment No. 120, 13
December 1997, “Victimage and Virtual Inclusion” (www.anthropo-
etics.ucla.edu/views/vw120.htm).
85. Eisenman’s plan was widely criticized in Germany for being too
abstract. Eventually, the German government made him include an
information center in the concept so as to provide at least some form
of historical documentation. For a full account of the debates regard-
ing the Memorial see Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past. United Germa-
ny and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London & New York: Routledge,
2002), esp. Chapter 8, “The Holocaust Memorial,” 194-232.
86. The museum, which was open to visitors while it was still empty,
proved to be a popular attraction solely on the basis of its architectonic
effects.
87. New York: Pantheon, 1997; German original: Der Vorleser (Zu-
rich: Diogenes 1995).
88. See in particular Omer Bartov, “Germany as Victim,” New Ger-
man Critique, 80 (2000), 29-40; J.J. Long, “Bernhard Schlink’s Der
Vorleser and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke: Best-Selling Re-
sponses to the Holocaust,” in German Language and Literature Today:
International and Popular, eds. Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and
Julian Preece (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), 49-66; Helmut Schmitz,
“Malen nach Zahlen? Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser und die Unfä-
higkeit zu trauern,” �Painting by numbers? Schlink’s The Reader and
the inability to mourn] German Life and Letters 3 (2002), 296-311;
and Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence. West German Litera-
ture and the Holocaust (New York & London: Routledge, 1999), 207-
216.
89. Schlink, who is a professor of law and a practicing attorney,
“frames” his heroine in a very deliberate way. Hanna’s guilt is made
explicit by confronting her with an extraordinary situation requir-
ing an easily made act of free choice; the crime is however mitigated
somewhat because it is unpremeditated and passive. Also, it remains
unclear whether Hanna was simply doing her duty or whether she was
“cruel and uncontrolled” like another guard called the “Mare” (see
The Reader, 118-119). The weak circumstantial evidence of Hanna’s
brutality is evidently meant to make us decide in dubio pro reo.
90. This initiation is symbolically sanctioned by his mother, who
sends him to “Frau Schmitz” so that he may thank her for helping
him after he was sick in public.
91. The Reader, 196.
92. See in particular Long, “Best-Selling Responses”: “By accepting
the proffered identification with Hanna, the reader can abdicate re-
sponsibility for engaging with the vexed moral questions that any seri-
ous discussion of the Holocaust necessarily raises” (55).
93. See Bartov, “Germany as Victim”: “�...] metaphorically, Michael
becomes the Jewish victim, both by virtue with his association with
Hanna as the reader, and thanks to the grace of his late birth, which
prevented him from becoming a perpetrator. Yet, even as he tilts
Notes 243
toward the category of victim, Schlink contextualizes his tale within

a framework of emotional numbness and sexual obsession, both of
which are above or below morality, since the former is a blank and a
void, and the latter is involuntary and uncontrollable. Thus numb-
ness and obsession are a means to avoid responsibility and reject all
ethical categories” (34).
94. Both Schmitz in “Malen nach Zahlen?” and Bartov in “Germany
as Victim” diagnose Michael as suffering from the syndrome defined
by the Mitscherlichs.
95. See Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu
trauern �The inability to mourn] (Munich: Piper, 1988 �orig. 1967]):
“�...] we must broaden the insight into ourselves so that we recognize
ourselves in those horrifying scenes �...] in which 100, 500 or 1,000
corpses lie before us – corpses of those we have killed. That would mean
an insightful, empathetic acceptance of victims long after the time of
terror has passed” (82).
96. Schmitz, “Malen nach Zahlen?,” 311.
97. See Bartov, “Germany as Victim,” 40. If I understand Bartov’s use
of a Primo Levi quote correctly, this direct experience of Holocaust
terror – akin to looking at the Gorgon’s head and turning to stone
– is impossible anyway; all we can do is belatedly cobble together our
ravaged post-Holocaust identity in a quasi-fictional, simulatory way.
Hence Wilkomirski’s fraudulent memoirs, which mourn virtually, are
more acceptable to Bartov than Schlink’s inability to mourn at all in
the postmodern mode.
98. For more on Goffman’s concept of framing and performatism see
Chapter One in this book, 10-12.
99. See in particular Goffman’s essay “The Nature of Deference and
Demeanor,” in Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-
Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 47-96, in particular 95.
100. Even The Reader’s harshest critics, such as Bartov and Long,
agree that Michael’s representation of Hanna cannot be taken at face
value. Both suggest however that Schlink has not distanced himself
enough from Michael’s perspective.
101. For a full discussion see his Things Hidden Since the Foundation
of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), esp. 3-30.
Bill Niven, in a similar argument, has linked Hanna’s behavior with a
“culture of shame” (as opposed to a “culture of guilt”). See his subtly
argued and perspicacious article “Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and

the Problem of Shame,” Modern Language Review 2 (2003), 381-396.
102. See Niven, “The Problem of Shame,”: “It is as if she �Hanna]
had hoped to slip back into the role of passive recipient. Realizing that
this will not be possible, she escapes, in carefully stage-managed style,
into suicide” (395).
103. Typical of this is the line taken by Nancy in “Our History.”
According to this way of thinking, any “humanist” or “democratic”
attempt to project a feeling of social community or hope is an uncon-
scious repetition of the fascist project (115). The only tenable alterna-
tive to this kind of self-delusion is the critical act of “taking history to
its limit” – with that limit being marked, apparently endlessly, by our
attitude toward events now lying three generations in the past.
104. I’ve treated Pelevin in more detail in my article “Thematischer
und performativer Minimalismus bei Eric Gans und Viktor Pelevin,”
�Thematic and performative minimalism in Eric Gans and Viktor
Pelevin] in Minimalismus zwischen Leere und Exzeß �Minimalism be-
tween emptiness and excess], ed. by Mirjam Goller and Georg Witte,
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach Sonderband 51 (2001), 233-247; the
article compares Pelevin’s fictional monism and approach to capital-
ism with Gans’s generative anthropology.
105. Original: Sedmikostelí. Gotický román z Prahy �Sevenchurch. A
gothic novel of Prague] (Prague: Argo, 1999). The novel has been
translated into German as Die Rache der Baumeister. Ein Kriminal-
roman aus Prag �The revenge of the architects. A detective story of
Prague] (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2001).
106. Sedmikostelí, 64.
107. Sedmikostelí, 326.
108. By contrast, Urban’s other recent book, Hastrman �The water
demon] (Prague: Argo, 2001) supplies us with a plausible object of
ideological identification. The half-piscine, half-human hero, who in
the 19th century acts as a cruel avenger of human hubris, returns in
the 20th as a merciless green terrorist. In the end, however, he is able
to recognize the superiority of a political or symbolic vengeance over
a purely physical one. In this case, Urban draws on Kant directly.
The amoral, fish-like hero, who in the 19th century once boasted of
“the starry sky within me and the moral law beside me” (29) becomes
a true Kantian in the 20th: he recognizes that the green commune
Notes 245
whose members he helps “have at least for the time being foregone
their egoism and have become parts of a perfectly functioning whole”
(393). Realizing that his avenging function is superfluous, the hero
allows himself to be violently and ritually sacrificed for the good of
the green cause – something entirely in keeping with the tenets of an
archaically founded Kantianism.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. A commune member pretending to be mentally retarded is left by

his “attendant” in the company of several fierce-looking motorcycle
gang members, who interpret his grunting attempt to leave them as a
wish to use the toilet. Assuming that he is truly severely retarded, they
have no qualms about helping him urinate.
2. The Derridean approach to framing aims to show that there is no
way to discuss intrinsic, inner space without including extrinisic, outer
space in it. Hence the frame, which is where inside and outside meet,
constitutes itself out of an irreducible duality which, for Derrida, is
the paradoxical point of departure and end point of all analysis.
3. It is interesting to note that Erving Goffman’s notion of face-to-
face interaction works in a similar way. The reliability of interaction is
made possible by the “fit” between the self (inner frame) and an outer
frame (meaning the physical world, the social ecology and the institu-
tional setting). As Collins suggests in his “Theoretical Continuities in
Goffman’s Work,” in Erving Goffman. Exploring the Interaction Order,
ed. by Paul Drew and Anthony Wooton (Boston: Northeastern Uni-
versity Press, 1988), “only if the larger frame is properly handled can
conversation take place” (51).
4. The World in a Frame. What We See in Films (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002), 44-51.
5. World in a Frame, 48.
6. 1987, 48-49.
7. See his Cinema 1. The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986) and Cinema 2. The Time Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
8. Buddhism, which also plays a role in performatism, is a special case.
Although dispensing with the notion of a personal God, Buddhist-
influenced fictions such as Ghost Dog and American Beauty suggest no
less than Western theist fictions that reality is constructed around a

subject, and that the subject, in order to transcend, must merge with
that construct.
9. See Gans’s treatment of this in his “Originary and/or Kantian Aes-
thetics,” Poetica 35 (2003), 335-353.
10. See “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism,” Anthropoetics 2
(2000/2001) (www.anthropoetics.ucla. edu/ap0602/perform.htm).
11. For more on the theory of aspirated inner space developed by Pe-
ter Sloterdijk, see Chapter Five, 168-175.
12. Goffman’s Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
(New York: Pantheon, 1967) warns of this: “If the individual could
give himself the deference he desired there might be a tendency for
society to disintegrate into islands inhabited by solitary cultish men,
each in continuous worship at his own shrine” (58). See also Jean-Luc
Marion’s critique of solipsism, discussed in Chapter Five in this book,
199-200.
13. For more on the dyadic character of theism see also the discussion
of Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology in Chapter Five in this book, 169-171.
14. Cinema 2, 263.
15. Cinema 1, 62.
16. Cinema 1, 20.
17. Cf. Cinema 2: “�...] the essence of the cinematographic movement-
image lies in extracting from vehicles or moving bodies the movement
which is their common substance, or extracting from movements the
mobility which is their essence” (23).
18. Cf. Deleuze Cinema 2: “�...] the sensory-motor schema is no longer
in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It is
shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions ceased to be
linked together, and spaces are now neither co-ordinated nor filled. �...]
It is here that the reversal is produced: movement is no longer simply ab-
errant, aberration is now valid in itself and designates time as its direct
cause. Time is ‘out of joint’: it is off the hinges assigned to it by behavior
in the world, but also by movements of the world” (40-41).
19. Cinema 2, 41.
20. See also Fredric Jameson’s discussion in his Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1992), 295.
21. Ethan and Joel Coen, The Man Who Wasn’t There (London: Faber
Notes 247
and Faber, 2001), 26.

22. Sven Spieker, of the University of California at Santa Barbara,
suggested to me that Ed Crane’s longing for a transcendent world is
caused by his being homosexual. At first, this doesn’t seem convincing
at all. Ed rejects a pass made by Creighton Tolliver, and, if anything,
seems to be asexual – he doesn’t sleep with his wife and crashes his
car after Birdie Abundas makes him an unambiguous offer. However,
some small clues indicate that a repressed sense of opposite gendered-
ness plays a major role in his spiritual quest. For example, before Ed
is electrocuted, a patch of his leg is shaved in the exact way that Ed
shaved a patch of Doris’s leg earlier on, suggesting that the only way
a man could be treated like a woman in the 1940s is in the death
chamber. Also, Ed is writing his story for a men’s magazine featuring
pictures of half-naked, muscular hunks on the cover–the only type of
venue where repressed homosexuality could safely be expressed in the
1940s. If Spieker’s theory is true, Ed would not be looking to express
his homosexuality in 1940s-style terms – as a “pansy” like Creighton
Tolliver – but in transcendent ones as yet unknown to himself, and
in fact also to us. Doris (with her masculine, blunt personality and
anti-Italian self hatred) and Ed would then be reunited in a Great
Beyond where all gender and ethnic distinctions have been overcome
for good.
23. The Man Who Wasn’t There, 104-105.
26. As Gans notes in his Chronicle Nr. 83, 8 March 19977, “Film
Open and Closed,” (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/ view83.htm)
the universalization of color in movies and TV “makes impossible the
abstract shadow-world of the film noir and its closed predecessors.” By
making an aesthetically “impossible” movie, the Coen Brothers sug-
gest the possibility that any frame of reference can be transcended–as
a one-time performance.
27. “After ‘After’: The Arkive Fever of Alexander Sokurov,” 5 May
2003 (www.artmargins.com).
28. “An Ark for a Pair of Media: Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” 5 May 2003
(www.artmargins.com).
29. See the discussion of this in Kujundzić, “Arkive Fever.”
30. For more on this see www.dogme95.dk.
31. As outlined in his Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 113-121.
32. Cinema 2, 40-41.
33. Cinema 2, 34-35.
34. Within the inescapable, treacly real time of the shot Sokurov and
Büttner use numerous tricks to speed up or modulate our apprehen-
sion of time, most notably through camera movement and/or the use
of music. Also, as Oliver Baumgarten has noted in an article in the
internet version of the film magazine Schnitt (www.schnitt.de/filme/
artikel/russian_ark.shtml), Büttner uses ersatz-cuts to compensate
for the lack of the real thing. When things start to slow down, for
example, he does a closeup (of gloved hands, for example) and then
swings the camera around to a long shot with full depth of field, thus
simulating the mechanics of the cut within real time.
35. “Archive Fever.”
36. Although even this argument seems forced sometimes. The clas-
sic artistic (and clinical) figure of the melancholic doesn’t move. If the
camera stroll through the Hermitage is supposed to exemplify melan-
choly, then it’s a pretty lively variant of it.
37. You could probably also argue with Deleuze that Leonard’s type
of consciousness is a “spiritual automaton,” a highly restricted reaction
to outside impulses directed by a single, deeply embedded memory.
However, in Deleuzian and Bergsonian terms Leonard’s condition
embodies “bad” time–a series of presents that are chopped out of the
flow of time and then pasted back together again. It is only in the
pathological dysfunctionality of this minimal setting that the theist
and deist conceptions can meet.
38. Andy Klein, in his “Everything You Wanted to Know about
‛Memento,’” Salon Magazine 28 June 2001 (www.salon.com), invested
enough energy for five film reviews in trying to untangle Memento’s plot
and came to the conclusion that it doesn’t work even on its own terms:
“the only way to reconcile everything is to assume huge inconsistencies
in the nature of Leonard’s disorder. In fact, in real life, such inconsisten-
cies apparently exist, if Oliver Sacks is to be believed. But to build the
plot around them without giving us some hints seems like dirty pool.”
39. See his Chronicle Nr. 269, 31 August 2002, “Mulholland Drive.”
(www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw269.htm).
40. See, for example, Nr. 42, 11 May 1996 “Tarentino Transcen-
Notes 249
dence” (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ views/vw42.htm) or Nr. 80, 15

February 1997, “Triangular Utopias” (www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/
views/ vw80.htm).
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Analogous to the theist God, who places humankind into an im-

perfect framework in which He then intervenes in unpredictable, un-
knowable ways. Like acts of God in general, theist devices appear to
be pointless or unmotivated.
2. Readers familiar with deconstructive discourse will recognize this
as the exact theological opposite of what is done by deconstruction.
For deconstruction, such defects or lacunae mark the fatal nothing-
ness lurking beyond signification. The whole point of occidental
metaphysics, from its perspective, is to cover up, defer or deny these
markers through the application of ever more discursive twists and
turns. The melancholy, metaphysically pessimistic goal of deconstruc-
tion is to critique this cover-up or repression through the application
of its own discourse, which in turn helps realize precisely that deferral
which it itself is unmasking.
3. Cf. the discussion in Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe. Das kunst-
lose Wort. Gedanken zur Baukunst �Mies van der Rohe. The Artless
Word. Thoughts on Architecture] (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), esp. 147-
174.
4. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency (Basel: Birkhäuser
Verlag, 1997 �orig. 1955]).
5. Signs of Paradox, 39.
7. The Flatiron building in New York is the exception confirming the
rule: occasionally, intersecting streets really do require acute angles. In
performatist works, the acuteness is always optional.
8. One could oppose this to Heidegger’s notion of the Geviert or four-
fold as the point of architectonic origin, as outlined in his “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking,” in Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London & New York: Routledge, 1997),
100-108. Whereas the performative threefold relation is pre-semantic
and ostensive, the fourfold relation between “earth and air, men and
gods” is necessarily already semantic or, as Gans and Derrida would
say, metaphysical. In his own remarks on architecture in “Architec-

ture Where the Desire May Live” (in Rethinking Architecture, 319-
323) Derrida suggests two by now familiar patterns derived from his
text analyses. Architecture may either be labyrinthine, a mark of the
failure of the Tower of Babel to impose a universal language/architec-
ture on humankind (322), or “an experience of the Supreme which is
not higher but in a sense more ancient than space and therefore is a
spatialization of time” (323)–in other words, an architectural incar-
nation of différance. In this last instance, Derrida is a hair’s breadth
away from generative anthropology’s notion of the human and the
sacred. What is missing, as always, is the causal nexus that would
explain why this leap from time to space came about in the first place.
Derrida’s originary moment remains a brilliant, self-engendering act
without any anchoring in the scene of the human.
9. Gehry himself considers these structures to be no longer postmod-
ern. However, the Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague (popu-
larly called “Ginger and Fred” or ”The Dancing House”) as well as the
so-called “Horse’s Head” conference room in the DG Bank contain
anthropomorphic elements reminiscent of the postmodern habit of
semanticizing architectonic relations. Moreover, the “Horse’s Head”
contains what look to me like large buckyballs, thus suggesting–by
way of quotation–a double origin of undular organicity and angular
crystality.
12. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 108-118.
13. For more on this technique see Fritz Neumeyer, “A World in It-
self: Architecture and Technology,” in The Presence of Mies, ed. by De-
tlef Mertins (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 71-84;
here 78.
14. Falk Jaeger, Architektur für das neue Jahrtausend �Architecture for
the new Millennium] (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001).
15. Architektur, 179.
16. See Claus Käplinger, “Monumentaler Raum der Stille” �Monu-
mental Space of Silence], Tagesspiegel, 29 November 1998 (www2.
tagesspiegel.de/archiv/1998/11/30/ku-ar-9330.html).
17. See the interview with Schultes “Die Republik muss sich wich-
Notes 251
tig nehmen” �The Republic must take itself seriously], Der Spiegel,
Nr. 17, April 2001, 200-206 (also available at www.spiegel.de/spiegel/
0,1518,130871,00.html).
18. Hanno Rauterberg, “Enthusiast des neuen Raums” �Enthusiast
of the new space], Die Zeit Nr. 42, 12 October 2000, 51 (also avail-
able at www.zeit.de/2000/42/Kultur/200042_schultes.html).
19. The mainstream press’s reaction to the Chancellery has been mixed.
A positive view can be found in Rauterberg’s “Enthusiast des neuen
Raumes.” For more on the standard criticism directed at the building
see the above-cited Spiegel interview “Die Republik muss sich wichtig
nehmen.”
20. In Gans’s reckoning, post-millennialism starts with the reunifi
reunifica-
ca-
tion of Central Europe and the victory of capitalism, rather than with
the year 2000.
21. See “Die Republik muss sich wichtig nehmen.”
22. See Jaeger, Architektur für das neue Jahrtausend, 68.
23. Mathias Oswald Ungers, “Der Entwurf für die Badische Landes-
bibliothek in Karlsruhe” �The plan for the State Library of Baden in
Karlsruhe], Buch. Leser. Bibliothek. Festschrift der Badischen Landesbi-
bliothek zum Neubau, �Book. Reader. Library. Festschrift celebrating
the completion of the State Library in Baden], ed. by Gerhard Römer
(Karlsruhe, 1992), 63-69.
24. “Entwurf,” 68.
25. “Entwurf,” 68.
26. “Entwurf,” 68.
Notes for Chapter 5
1. Life after Postmodernism. Essays on Value and Culture, ed. by John

Fekete (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
2. See in particular Against Theory. Literary Studies and the New Prag-
matism, ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985).
3. See Knapp and Michaels’ critique of de Man in Against Theory,
22-23.
4. His recent book The Shape of the Signifier. 1967 to the End of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), is a stinging critique of
postmodernism and poststructuralism that, however, presents no pos-
itive alternative to them.

5. Groys is best known in America for his The Total Art of Stalinism:
Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 1992) a controversial – and, in my view, ultimately
successful – attempt to reintegrate Stalinist culture into an epochal
concept of cultural history.
7. Über das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturökonomie (Munich: Hanser
1992).
8. Über das Neue, 150.
9. See Über das Neue: “The successful, true description changes the
boundary path separating the valorized and the profane and in suc-
ceeding robs itself of its own truth” (151).
10. Über das Neue, 48.
11. Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien �Under suspici-
on. A Phenomenology of the Media] (München: Hanser 2000).
12. Unter Verdacht, 7.
15. Sphären I. Blasen �Spheres I. Bubbles] (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-
kamp, 1998); Sphären II. Globen �Spheres II. Globes] (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999); Sphären III. Schäume �Spheres III. Foams]
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004).
16. See his The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion (San
Diego: Harcourt, 1987).
17. Sphären I, 63.
18. Sphären I, 29.
19. Sphären I, 46.
20. Sphären I, 38.
21. Sphären III, 78.
22. In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1993),
139-212. Sloterdijk, although not uncritical of dangers posed by tech-
nology, has none of Heidegger’s rooted-in-the-sod, anti-modern bias.
In keeping with his attempt to describe the “worst-best of all possible
worlds” (III, 878) Sloterdijk also accords considerable space to a treat-
ment of what he calls “atmoterrorism” (III, 89-125).
23. See Sphären III, 78 as well as Monadology, § 61.
24. Sphären I, 32.
25. Sphären I, 41.
Notes 253
26. Sphären I, 40.

28. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London:
Athlone Press, 1988), 3-25.
33. See Sphären I, 423-424 as well as the discussion of Olga Tokarc-
zuk’s “The Hotel Capital” in Chapter Two of this book, 44-53. The
position of the synthetic observator injects a Kantian corrective into
Sloterdijk’s otherwise Leibnizian thinking.
34. See his main work, The Laws of Imitation (Gloucester, Mass.: P.
Smith, 1962). Sloterdijk also draws on a work obscure even in its own
time, Monadologie et sociologie, (Paris: Institut Synthélabo, 1999 �orig.
1893]).
35. Thousand Plateaus, 218-219.
37. As outlined in Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Self and Other in Lit-
erary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).
40. Sphären III, 261-308. Sloterdijk titles this position “Neither Con-
tract nor Natural Growth” �Nicht Vertrag, nicht Gewächs].
42. Sphären III, 877-8.
43. See Chapter One in this book, note 2, 230.
44. Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002 �French orig. 1997]).
45. Being Given, 40.
46. Being Given, 45-46.
54. In conventional terms anamorphosis is a distorted image that re-

quires an odd or unusual angle to be seen in proportion. For Marion’s
own definition see Being Given, 119-125.
55. Given Time. 1: Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1992).
56. Given Time, Chapter 2, passim.
65. See Being Given, 113.
66. For more on Goffman’s relation to performatism see Chapter
One, 10-12.
67. Being Given, 178. Here the relevant passage in full:
�…] Couldn’t we imagine, by contrast, that givenness admits
variation by degree? On this hypothesis, the determinations
of the given phenomenon, while remaining originary and de-
finitively acquired, would modulate with variable intensity.
As a result, thresholds of phenomenality in terms of givenness
would define discontinuous strata of phenomena, which would
then be distinguished by their level of givenness and no longer
by their belonging to a region. �…]
68. For a discussion of keying, see Goffman’s Frame Analysis. An Essay
on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1986), 40-82.
69. For more on this see Randal Collins, “Theoretical Continuities in
Goffman’s Work,” in Erving Goffman. Exploring the Interaction Order,
eds., Paul Drew and Anthony Wooton (Boston: Northeastern Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 41-64.
70. To put this another way, it seems to me that Marion’s phenom-
enological argumentation has less to fear from a confrontation with
Goffman’s frame analysis than does Derrida’s deconstruction, which
regards quotidian convention as a perhaps necessary, but nonetheless
Notes 255
misguided, illusion.
72. See Being Given, 194-195.
77. Critique of Judgment, § 57.
84. See the Critique of Judgment, § 22.
87. In other words, the dualist way of dealing with the body propa-
gated most prominently by Judith Butler. For more on this in regard
to performatism see also Chapter One, 23-29.
92. See, respectively, Chapter One, 24-25 and Chapter Two, 58-63 in
this book.
93. See in particular Chapter 3 in Sphären I, “Humans in the Magic
Circle: An Intellectual History of the Fascination with Proximity,” 211-
268.
96. American Beauty, 100.
97. See Chapter One, 16 in this book.
98. In this regard Marion calls Kant’s transcendental I “the counter-
model of the gifted” (278).
102. See the discussion of the originary scene in Gans, Originary

Thinking. Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 8-9.
103. See the discussion of Derrida in Gans, Signs of Paradox, 148-
149.
106. See his Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic
Structures, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. Chapter
3, “The Necessity of Paradox.”
107. Originary Thinking, 22.
Notes for Chapter 6
1. See his full treatment of this in Originary Thinking: Elements of

Generative Anthropology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1993, esp. the “Introduction,” 1-27.
2. See Originary Thinking, 8-9.
3. Gans treats the Kantian affi
affinity
nity of his own theory in his “Origi-
nary and/or Kantian Aesthetics,” Poetica 1-2 (2004), 335-353. The
original Kantian concepts are summarized in Critique of Judgment,
§ 22.
4. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 83-118.
5. For more on this see my “Originary Aesthetics and the End of
Postmodernism,” The Originary Hypothesis: a Minimal Proposal for
Humanistic Inquiry, ed. by Adam Katz (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group,
2007), 59-82, esp. 60-64.
6. See, for example, Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art.
Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism
(New York: McPherson & Co., 2005), esp. Chapter 1, “Kant, Du-
champ, and Dada,” 15-35 or Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art.
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press:
Princeton 1995), esp. Chapter Four, “Modernism and the Critique of
Pure Art: The Historical Vision of Clement Greenberg,” 61-78.
7. The Abuse of Beauty. Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Open Court:
Chicago, 2003), 15.
8. See The Abuse of Beauty, in particular the chapter “Three Ways to
Notes 257
Look at Art,” 125-142.

9. For more on this see Gans’s historical outline of the ostensive in
Originary Thinking, esp. Chapters 7-12.
10. This distinguishes it from the structuralist tendency to privilege
the sign as icon and the poststructuralist tendency to privilege the
sign as index. For more on this distinction see my “Originary Aes-
thetics,” 61-64.
11. See also Chapter One in this book, 3-4.
12. See Chapter Two in this book, 57.
13. For more on the rationale behind the choice of “performatism,”
see “Originary Aesthetics,” 64-65.
14. For a detailed study of performance art in postmodernism see
McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art.
15. A complete pictorial overview of her performances and other proj-
ects can be found at
www.vanessabeecroft.com
16. As refl
reflected,
ected, for example, in the skeptical review of her Perfor-
mance 55 by Hermann Pfütze, “Hundert nackte Frauen” �A hundred
naked women], Kunstforum 176 (2005), 270-271.
17. Most notably as chronicled by Judith Thurman in “The Wolf at
the Door: Can an Eating Disorder Be Turned into Art?” The New
Yorker, March 17, 2003, 84-123.
18. Notable exceptions were VB 39 and 42, which used fully clothed
U.S. sailors who had the approval of their commanding officers to
participate.
19. See her description of this in her interview with Thomas Kellein
in Vanessa Beecroft (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 123-124.
20. This creates problems for poststructuralist and/or feminist inter-
preters like Christine Ross, who in her treatment of Beecroft in The
Aesthetics of Disengagement. Contemporary Art and Depression (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2006) speaks of a “preoc-
cupation with homogenized body images and standardized ideals of
femininity” (54) and of the “persistence of a desire to be feminine”
(60). In the logic of late postmodernism, the position of not having an
identifiable gender (i.e., being reduced to the female sex) is simply it-
self another standardized gender role. It seems hardly necessary to add
that the result is a totalizing discourse oblivious to its own exclusion
of the human body as a source of originary significance. For more on
the performatist critique of gender theory see Chapter One, 23-29.

21. For an analogous literary use of the uniform to achieve a posi-
tive, unifying loss of individuality see the analysis of Olga Tokarczuk’s
“The Hotel Capital” in Chapter Two of this book, 48.
22. Which consists of a black woman covered with evenly spaced ver-
tical white cloth strips against a horizontal black-and-white striped
background and a white woman covered with evenly spaced, verti-
cal black cloth strips against a horizontal black-and-white-striped
background. “Natural” race, in other words, merges with the artificial
black-and-white pattern constructed by the artist.
23. See Pfütze, “Hundert nackte Frauen,” 271.
24. Aesthetics of Disengagement, 68.
28. Ross eventually does identify Beecroft’s performances with a
closed situation – namely with the aesthetic simulation of a clinical
experiment: “What we have here is the perfect replica of a scientific
laboratory in which subjects are asked to take part in an experiment
that will test their reactions and coping abilities to a specific stressful
life event” (Aesthetics of Disengagement, 80). As Ross quite correctly
notes, the performers react to the stress situation by gradually giving
up their uniform poses and affirming their own personal identities
(82). This is precisely the goal of all theist narratives: individuation
(and in ideal cases transcendence) is achieved by reacting freely to the
force exerted by an outer “divinely” imposed frame (for more on this
see Chapter One in this book, 19-21).
29. Beecroft, who appears to have no philosophical pretensions, con-
sciously operates beneath the threshold of concept: “What I like about
the performances is the live event, the moment where you don’t know
what’s going to happen. It’s a question of formalizing an idea with-
out having it appear conceptually” (Kellein, Vanessa Beecroft, 130 �my
translation from the German]).
30. Dave Hickey, VB 08 – 36. Vanessa Beecroft’s Performances (Ostfil-
dern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 7.
31. As documented in his Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organiza-
tion of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), esp.
Chapter 10, “Breaking Frame,” 345-377. For more on Goffman and
Notes 259
performatism see also Chapter One in this book, 10-12.

32. This sort of deliberate frame breaking can incidentally also be
found as a plot device in performatist narratives, most notably in the
Dogma movie Idiots (discussed in Chapter One, 14-15). There is, of
course, also real-life frame breaking in Beecroft’s performances when
spectators try to communicate with the models, provoke them, or
take off their own clothes (as documented in Pfütze, “Hundert nackte
Frauen”).
33. This in contrast to Ross, who in Aesthetics of Disengagement in-
terprets the lack of discourse peculiar to the intuitive state as a dis-
engaged, depressive condition rather than as an originary, potentially
positive moment of autonomous self-empowerment or individuation.
34. In Kantian thought the categories (quantity, quality, relation, mo-
dality) form a bridge between intuitive empirical experience (which
is pre-conceptual) and the understanding (which is conceptual). In
Beecroft and the other artists I will be discussing, the categories seem
to emerge spontaneously out of the intuitively experienced material,
which however has been organized beforehand by a theist artist. It
goes almost without saying that this theist manipulation is foreign to
Kant, whose thinking is explicitly deist (see in particular A 675/ B703
in Critique of Pure Reason).
35. This lack of postmodern discursivity has not been lost on post-
modern artists like Vaginal Davis, who has put on queer burlesque
send-ups of Beecroft’s performances that supply the “missing” dimen-
sion of gender. For a lengthier discussion of this see Jennifer Doyle,
Sex Objects. Art and the Dialectic of Desire (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), 121-140.
36. In Gans’s generative linguistics the imperative is the second basic
linguistic form arising out of the ostensive (the imperative is, like the
ostensive, still pre-conceptual, but is directed at an absent, rather than
a present, object). Gans expounds on this relation at length in his The
Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1981).
37. Kellein, Vanessa Beecroft, 129 �my translation from the German].
38. A representative English-language edition is Bernd and Hilla
Becher, Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings (London: Thames & Hud-
son, 2005). The influence of the Bechers on German photography
in general and Gursky in particular is documented in Peter Galassi,
“Gursky’s World,” in Andreas Gursky, ed. by Peter Galassi (New York:

Abrams, 2001).
39. A systematic catalogue documenting basic human types in hun-
dreds, if not thousands, of photographs. For more on Sander see, for
example, Robert Kramer, August Sander, Photographs of an Epoch,
1904-1959 (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1980).
40. The Bechers were presumably not trying to send a direct politi-
cal message. However, the pictures were made around the same time
that heavy industry in the Ruhr Valley, and in particular coal mining,
was starting to lose its central role in the German economy, and they
reflect a strong popular identification of Ruhr valley residents with
the legacy of heavy industry. (This identification is so powerful even
today that it has proven politically impossible to close down the highly
unprofitable coal-mining industry, which the German government is
committed to subsidize until the year 2018.)
41. In his series Interieurs, for example, another Becher student,
Thomas Ruff, did to petty-bourgeois interiors what Struth did to ur-
ban exteriors: he photographed them in a way that made them look
entirely desolate. See, for example, Thomas Ruff. Fotografien 1979
– heute (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2001).
42. The crushing global dominance of capitalism has made Marxism
into a kind of theory of internationalist localism in which the highest
virtue is indigenous resistance to capitalism’s homogenizing force. In art
criticism, this position is propounded most eloquently by Julian Stal-
labrass in his Art Incorporated. The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. “The New World Order,” 29-72.
43. In Andreas Gursky. Images, ed. by Fiona Bradley (München: Okta-
gon 1995).
44. In Andreas Gursky. Images.
45. This massive constriction of both vertical and horizontal space is
a feature encountered time and time again in the work of Struth and
Ruff and fits in well with the Nietzschean motif of “wiping out the
horizon” that will be encountered again further below (see 217-218
below).
46. Critics seem to agree on the optimistic outlook of the photo. Ma-
rie Luise Syring describes the human figure as being “between heaven
and earth, alone and yet surrounded by protective architecture, small
and yet not lost.” See her “Wo liegt ‘ohne Titel’?,” in Andreas Gur-
Notes 261
sky. Photographs from 1984 to the Present, ed. by Mary Luise Syring
(Munich; Schirmer/Mosel, 1998) �no pagination]. Greg Hilty goes
even farther: he says the bridge “resembles a giant Japanese Shinto
gate which frames the otherwise diminutive human subject. The man
is miniscule, but potentially heroic; the image is minimal and mun-
dane, but suggests a nodal point of infinite perspectives.” See his arti-
cle “The Occurrence of Space” in Andreas Gursky. Images, 15.
47. As quoted in Rupert Pfab, “Wahrnehmung und Kommunikati-
on. Überlegungen zu neuen Motiven von Andreas Gursky,” in An-
dreas Gursky. Photographs from 1984 to the Present �no pagination].
48. “I generally let things develop slowly…,” in Andreas Gursky. Fo-
tografien 1984-1988, ed. by Toby Alleyne-Gee (Ostfildern: Cantz,
1988), IX.
49. Andreas Gursky, “I generally let things develop slowly…,” in An-
dreas Gursky. Fotografien 1984-1988, ed. by Toby Alleyne-Gee (Ost-
fildern: Cantz, 1988), VIII.
50. This manipulative grounding of the sublime in beauty avoids the
metaphysical problems arising in Kant’s own argumentation when he
defines the sublime as immeasurable and incomparable – and is then
forced to introduce terms of comparison into his argument all the
same. For a critique of this see Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, esp.
the section “The Colossal,” 119-148.
51. Andreas Gursky. Fotografien 1984-1988, X.
52. In Thomas Ruff. Fotografien 1979 – heute �no pagination].
53. In Thomas Struth. 1977-2002 (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2002),
35.
54. Gursky’s treatment of space has a direct parallel in performatist
architecture’s techniques of dematerialization and transparency; for
more on this see Chapter Four, 122-123.
55. For a discussion of narrative centering, see Chapter One in this
book, 17-18 and 24-26.
56. Susanne Gaensheimer, “Second-Hand Experience,” Thomas De-
mand (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel 2004), 70.
57. Roxana Marcoci, “Paper Moon,” Thomas Demand (New York:
Museum of Modern Art 2005), �no pagination].
58. The inevitable poststructuralist objection – that Demand’s sup-
plementary outside explanations are as much a part of the photograph
as its supposedly discrete inner space – makes sense in epistemologi-
cal, but not in performative terms. Why spend months painstakingly

constructing and photographing a “traceless” scene in order to expose
your own creation as a failure with a few short remarks? Here as else-
where the point is not that Demand is “reinscribing” already existing
discursive reality; he’s creating a new reality of his own and reproject-
ing it categorically onto the consciousness of his viewers.
59. A good way of testing this is to go through a (previously
previously un-
known) collection of Demand’s photographs and try to figure out
just what media event they are about. My own personal identification
quotient is around zero, although Bathroom (citing a very well-known
German magazine image from the 1980s) seemed vaguely familiar
when I first saw it.
60. Michael Fried, “Without a Trace,” Artforum 3 (2005), 202.
61. For examples of the visual representation of imperfect theism in
architecture see also Chapter Four, 121-122.
62. “Without a Trace,” 202.
63. See “Without a Trace,” 202.
64. The painting was produced by carrying out a market analysis of
what people like in a painting (colors, abstraction vs. representation)
and then combining those wishes somewhat incongruously in a pic-
ture. The result is a painting done in the style of what appears to be
the Hudson River school and containing, among other things, a large
expanse of blue sky, George Washington, and a herd of deer.
65. End of Art, 195.
66. See End of Art, 199.
67. See his analysis in “The Lost Horizon” in Boris Groys, The To-
tal Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 81-83. Groys’s (and the
conceptualists’) basic thesis is that the utopian striving of modernism
was always eminently political and hence also complicit in the totali-
tarian “total work of art” of Stalinism.
68. See Unter Verdacht (Munich: Hanser 2000), esp. the section “Der
submediale Raum,” 27-116 as well as the discussion in Chapter Five of
this book, pp 164-168.
70. If it would not hopelessly confuse the issue it would be tempt-
ing to label this position Apollonian. In Nietzsche’s own words,
Apollonian form is enjoyed with a “direct or superfluous understand-
Notes 263
ing”; “all shapes speak to us”; “nothing is indifferent,” even as “the

sense of its status as appearance still shimmers through” (The Birth
of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music �Oxford: Oxford University Press
2000], 20). Performatism, however, is no less reducible to a Nietzs-
chean position than is, say, postmodernism, and the musical synthesis
of the Apollonian and Dionysian envisioned by Nietzsche is nowhere
in hearing range.
71. Lynne Cooke, among others, has noted the connection between
Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer and Gursky’s Düsseldorf Flughafen. See
her article “Visionäre (Per)Versionen,” in Andreas Gursky. Photographs
from 1984 to the Present, ed. by Mary Luise Syring (Munich;; Schirm-
er/Mosel, 1998) �no pagination].
72. As noted by Annelie Lütgens in her “Shrines and Ornaments:
A Look into the Display Cabinet. Andreas Gursky’s New Pictures,”
in Andreas Gursky. Fotografien 1984-1988, ed. by Toby Alleyne-Gee
(Ostfildern: Cantz, 1988), XVI.
73. See his remarks in Andreas Gursky. Fotografien 1984-1988, IX.
74. For examples see Tim Eitel. Terrain, ed. by Markus Stegmann
(Berlin, Holzwarth Publications, 2004).
75. This is also in contradistinction to Edward Hopper’s pictures of
urban, isolated humans. Eitel’s pictures lack the material volume and
existential gravitas of Hopper’s objects and people; they are emotion-
ally “flat” without being stereotypes. Similarly, Eitel’s paintings com-
pletely lack the feelings of distrust and malignancy that characterize
the portraits of the Belgian Luc Tuymans, who in this regard remains
a characteristically “Groysian,” postmodern painter of suspicion.
76. The demeanor of Eitel’s human subjects is strikingly similar to
that of participants in Beecroft’s performances, who are made to adopt
neutral facial expressions while oscillating between the uncomfortable
physical reality of the performance and its artificial, semiotic gesture.
For more on the characteristic opacity of performatist subjects, see
Chapter One, 8-9.
77. Interview in Iskusstvo 5 (2006), 54.
78. In his review “Erik Bulatov. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow,”
Artforum 1 (2007), 244 and 276, Tupitsyn suggests that after emi-
grating Bulatov entered into “a state of tranquility �…] with zero-
degree alienation” (244) and that “his paintings �after 1990] were
eligible for look-alike contests with promotional posters, sightseeing
ads, and other ‘life-celebrating’ items �…]” (276).

79. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the
End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT University Press), 1996.
80. In Neo Rauch. Works on Paper. 2003-2004 (Vienna: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2004), 5.
81. “‘Night-Work’ in Defence of Red, Yellow and Blue,” in Randge-
biet. Ausstellung Neo Rauch, ed. by Klaus Werner (Leipzig: Galerie für
Zeitgenössische Kunst, 2000), 25.
82. Although performatism was not intended as an artistic program,
at least one piece of art work has been inspired by it. Using Apple’s
text-to-speech software, an American artist living in Thailand, Dane
Larsen, created Performatist Piece with Embedded Text. Physically, the
piece consists of a black plastic pot filled with raw cotton with an MP3
player inside. Using Apple’s text-to-speech software, Larsen set up the
MP3 player to read my original essay on performatism (“Performa-
tism, or the End of Postmodernism”). The software’s distortion of the
original text results in a kind of semi-understandable speech emanat-
ing “magically” from the cotton. The video of the performance can be
viewed on Larsen’s blog at:
http://nofolete.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-01-12T13
%3A33%3A00%2B07%3A00&max-results=50
Index
About Schmidt, xi, 80, 89, 92, 93 authorial narration, x, 7, 13, 47,
aesthetic mode, x, xi, xii, 37, 57, 81, 82, 106, 233; definition of
176, 187, 199; and categories 19-21; and time 34, 101, 113;
214; Derrida’s critique of 1; see also theist mode
and dogma 13; and ethics 91; authorial perspective, (in art)
and identification 3, 8, 12; and 204, 209, 214
interiority 23; and framing 2,
19, 36, 39, 48, 86, 112, 170, Ball, Alan, 231, 232, 253
187, 188, 189, 202, 204, 211; Bartov, Omer, 241, 242
Gans’s definition of 196-197, Baudrillard, Jean, 49, 69
199, 205, 235, 237; and Holo- beauty, in architecture 22; in art
caust 69-70, 76; and intuition x, 23, 195, 210, 215, 216, 220;
205, 214; and Kant 48, 57, and closure 56, 57, 199, 200;
91, 173, 185, 197; and Marion and coercion 212; in Danto
175, 176, 183, 185, 188, 193; 198; ethical 81, 82; formal
and metaphysical optimism 206; as immanent relation
9; monist 2, 13; and paradox 194; in Marion 175, 177-
222; and performance 12, 178, 182, 185; metaphysical
46; postmetaphysical 22; and 30, 197; as quid pro quo 57;
sacrality 148, 190, 215; and and ostensivity 6, 55, 82, 91,
simplicity 120; temporal 29, 196; as otherness 239; and
33; as a trap 55, 221, 222; and phenomenological bracketing
work 226 237; in Roy 65-67, 239; in
Alleyne-Gee, Toby, 258, 260 Sloterdijk 170; and the sub-
Amélie, 14, 81, 82, 92, 93, 94, lime 237, 258; unified 40; as
104, 112 untruth 37; will to 200, 205;
Amenábar, Alejandro, 115 see also the aesthetic
American Beauty, xi, 3, 6, 8, 12, Becher, Bernd und Hilla, 206-
16, 19, 21, 25, 26, 35-36, 79, 207, 208, 209, 257
81, 82, 85, 92, 231, 232, 233, Beecroft, Vanessa, xii, 23, 195,
244, 253; analyzed in terms 201-206, 214, 220, 255, 256,
of Marion’s phenomenology 257, 260
188-190 Being John Malkovich, 28, 82, 87,
Amis, Martin, 70 88, 92, 94, 95
anti-art, x, 23, 197, 198, 201, Benigni, Roberto, 69
207 Bereś, Stanisław, 236
Blue Velvet, 79, 100 Davis, Vaginal, 257

Bradley, Fiona, 258 deconstruction, 1, 3, 12, 19, 23,
Braudy, Leo, 86 30, 54, 66, 75, 85, 94, 159,
Braunfels, Stephan, 140 176, 183, 186, 197, 229, 230,
Brener, Alexander, 223 238; of Mauss 178-180
Bulatov, Erik, 217-223, 261 Deleuze, Gilles, x, 30, 33, 80, 89-
Butler, Judith, 24, 26, 27, 28, 42, 90, 96-98, 108-110, 172, 173,
78, 95, 203, 229, 253 188, 234, 245, 246
Büttner, Tilman, 105, 246 Demand, Thomas, xii, 195, 213-
215, 259
capitalism, 32, 33, 40, 44, 47, 63, Derrida, Jacques, vii, x, 1, 10, 11,
64, 76, 77, 78, 192, 206, 207, 30, 33, 85, 87, 127, 168, 175,
212, 222, 223, 239, 243, 257 178, 179, 180, 182, 192, 197,
Carver, Raymond, 58-59, 60, 61, 232, 234, 244, 248, 252, 253,
62 254, 258
Cast Away, 80 Dogma (movie), 232
Celebration, The, 12, 16, 17, 79, Dogma 95, xi, 12, 14, 17, 103-
86-87, 91, 92, 104, 106, 112, 104
232 Döring-Smirnov, Renate 229
centering, 12, 17, 18, 29, 55, 57, double frame, x, 3, 5, 98, 167; in
82, 106, 259; the other 24-26; art 198, 200, 203, 209; defi-
in architecture 121, 123, 127, nition of 36-37; in Marion’s
128, 138, 142; in art 211 phenomenology 187; and sex-
Chéreau, Patrice, 81 uality 24; see also inner frame,
Cider House Rules, The, 16, 92, outer frame
93-94 Doyle, Jennifer, 257
closure, x, 1, 2, 39, 81, 84, 166, Drew, Paul, 252
189; in architecture 121, 126, Drubek-Meyer, Natascha, 105
154; in art 192, 199-200 dualism, ix, x, xii, 27, 28, 30, 31,
Coen, Ethan and Joel, 79, 99, 49, 58, 172, 173, 198, 208,
100, 103, 245, 246 217, 224, 253
Collins, Randal, 231, 244, 252 Durkheim, Emile, 11, 73, 173,
Cooke, Lynne, 260 182, 232, 235
Cube, 15, 81, 84, 91, 92, 99 Dvorak, Marta, 240
Culler, Jonathan, 230
Curtius, Robert, 229 Eisenman, Peter, 69
Eitel, Tim, xii, 195, 220-222,
Dancer in the Dark, 17, 85, 92 260
Danto, Arthur C., 198, 215-217, Eliade, Mircea, 45, 169
254 Elling, 87-88, 92
Index 265
Everything is Illuminated, 70 162, 167, 170, 172, 173, 174,

176, 193, 222, 230, 235, 243
Fekete, John, 249 Ghost Dog, vii, 18, 33, 79, 84, 92,
Fight Club, 115 112, 244
Fincher, David, 80, 82, 115 Girard, René, 4, 25, 74, 86, 230,
Fluck, Winfried, 237 231
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 70 globalization, 32, 47, 174, 207,
Forrest Gump, 80 211, 212
Foster, Sir Norman, xi, 117 God of Small Things, xi, 33, 40,
Foucault, Michel, x, 16, 27, 30, 63-67, 239, 240
42, 211, 232, 233 Goller, Mirjam, 243
Frank, Charlotte, 148, 149 Green Mile, The, 80
Fried, Michael, 214-215; 259 Greenberg, Clement, 177, 199,
Friedrich, Caspar David, 219, 205, 254
220, 221, 260 Groys, Boris, xii, 29, 164, 168,
functionalism, see transcendent 177, 178, 181, 198, 218-219,
functionalism 239, 250, 259
Gruber, Martin, 153
Gaensheimer, Susanne, 259 Gursky, Andreas, xii, 195, 206-
Galassi, Peter, 257 212, 219-220, 257, 258, 260
Gans, Eric, ix, xi, xiii, 7, 11, 12,
32, 36, 52, 55, 68, 86, 91, 115, Hanks, Tom, 80
116, 123, 126, 140, 152, 159, Hassan, Ihab, 229
162, 167, 172, 174, 194, 205, Heaven, 88
222, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, Hegelianism (in art criticism),
236, 237, 239, 240, 243, 244, 197, 198, 216, 217
246, 248, 249, 253, 254, 257; Heidegger, Martin, 169, 170, 176,
and the aesthetic 196-7; in 177, 185, 240, 248, 250
comparison to Marion 190- Hickey, Dave, 204, 256
193; and concept of ostensiv- homosexuality, 8, 25, 28, 101,
ity 4-6 245
Gehry, Frank, 125, 127, 139, 248 Hopper, Edward, 260
gender, in architecture 135; in “Hotel Capital, The” xi, 15, 18,
Beecroft’s art 202-203, 255, 21, 33, 40, 44-53, 77, 78, 234,
257; in Being John Malkovich 235, 236
94-95; in God of Small Things Hotel World, 18, 24, 32, 40-44,
66; in The Man Who Wasn’t 45, 50, 51, 52, 78, 234
There, 245; performatist ap- Husserl, Edmund, 176
proach to 23-28 Hutcheon, Linda, vii
generative anthropology, xiii, 159, Hutton, Louise, 155
Huyssen, Andreas, vii Marion’s phenomenology 177,

182-183, 185
Idiots, 14, 79, 82, 92, 103, 105, Käplinger, Claus, 249
188, 256 Katz, Adam, 254
inner frame, 3, 4, 5, 36, 55-56, Kellein, Thomas, 255
84, 127, 177, 178, 184, 187, Klein, Andy, 247
198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 215, Kleine-Kraneburg, Helmut, 153
222, 244; see also originary Knapp, Steven, 162-163, 249
scene, outer frame, intermedi- Komar, Vitaly, and Melamid, Al-
ate frame exandr, 215, 216, 237
intermediate frame, 84, 127 Kramer, Robert, 257
intertextuality, 40, 56, 58, 60 Kujundzić, Dragan, 104, 110,
Intimacy, 81, 82, 88 111, 112, 246
irony, in architecture 22, 119, Kukushka (The Cuckoo), 9, 83,
122, 142, 149; in art 195, 197, 112
207, 209, 211, 216, 219, 221, Kulik, Oleg, 223
223; in The Cuckoo 83; and
dogma 14; and framing 2, 3, Lacan, Jacques, x, 16, 51, 232
4; in Goffman 10; in Hotel Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 240
World 41, 42, 44; in The Man Landry, Donna, 238
Who Wasn’t There 99, 102; in Lanzman, Claude, 69
Panic Room 92; in Pelevin 19; Larsen, Dane, 261
performatist 14; and plot 13, Le Corbusier, 122
83; in postmodernism viii, ix, Leach, Neil, 248
6, 39, 76, 79, 193, 197, 198, Leibniz, 89, 90, 97
200, 208; in Sevenchurch 78 Léon, Hilde, 138
Libeskind, Daniel, 69, 125, 159
Jaeger, Falk, 128, 129, 248, 249 Life of Pi, vii, 15, 19, 40, 53-58,
Jahn, Helmut, xi, 132, 142 62
Jameson, Fredric, 30-31, 248 Likhachev, Dimitrii, 229
Jarmusch, Jim, 18, 33, 79 Long, J.J., 241, 242
Jencks, Charles, vii, viii, 119 Lütgens, Annelie, 260
Johnson, Philip, 124 Lynch, David, 79, 100, 115
Jonze, Spike, 82, 87 Lyotard, Jean-François, vii, 168
Jung, C.J., 236
MacLean, Gerald, 238
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 47, 48, 57, Man Who Wasn’t There, The, xi,
65, 71, 85, 91, 197, 200, 205, 21, 80, 86, 92, 96, 99-104,
217, 235, 236, 237, 239, 243, 245, 246
253, 256, 258; in regard to Marcoci, Roxanne, 259
Index 267
Marion, Jean-Luc, xii, 168, 175- the sign ix, x, xi, xii, 6, 36,
194, 237, 244, 251, 252, 253 193; in Tarde 173; untenabil-
Martel, Yann, vii, xi, 15, 40, 53 ity of in poststructuralism ix;
Marxism, 32, 63, 64, 67, 238, see also new monism
257 Morissette, Alanis, 232
Mauss, Marcel, 168, 178-180, Mulholland Drive, 115, 247
232
McEvilley, Thomas, 212, 254 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 68, 242
McHale, Brian, vii Neumeyer, Fritz, 247, 248
Memento, xi, 80, 96, 113-114, new monism, ix, x, xii, 161-194,
115, 247 227; and anti-theory 164; in
metaphysical optimism, 8, 9, 16, art 198, 219; and centering
50, 72, 75, 126, 175, 188, 211 17; in Gans 4; and Kant 182;
metaphysical pessimism, 60, 72, and performance 194; see also
79, 111, 159 monism
metaphysics, ix, 44, 89, 169, 172, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 232, 260
179, 180, 182, 192, 194, 247 Nietzscheanism, 52, 64, 68, 73,
Meyer, Adam, 238 74, 196, 197, 198, 212, 218,
Michaels, Walter Benn, ix, xii, 29, 223, 227, 258, 260
162-164, 168, 233, 234, 249 Niven, Bill, 240, 242
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 122, Nolan, Christopher, 114
126, 127, 146, 203, 247, 248 Nünning, Vera, 229
Mikhailovich, Boris, 223
Mitchell, W.J.T., 249 opaque subject, x, 8, 37, 80, 93,
Mitscherlich, Alexander and 94, 95, 96, 202, 203, 204,
Margarete, 73, 242 215, 221, 22
monism, vii, aesthetic 2, 13; in Open Your Eyes, 115
anti-theory 163; in architec- originary scene, 5, 6, 8, 11, 55,
ture 188, 128; in art 195, 197, 65, 82, 115, 126, 191, 192,
198, 224, 227; and culture 32; 194, 196, 232, 253; definition
and deification 12; Derrida’s of 3-4; see also inner frame,
critique of 179, 192; and his- outer frame, double framing
tory 30-31; in Groys 167-168, ostensive sign, x, xi, xiii, 9, 11,
182; in “Hotel Capital,” 44, 15, 29, 36, 50, 52, 55, 56, 62,
48; in Marion 185, 193, 237; 72, 75, 77, 81-85, 89, 91, 118,
in Memento 114; in Pelevin 120, 121, 123, 124, 127, 140,
18; and performatism 36; 162, 167, 205, 210, 214, 222,
radical 76-77; in Russian Ark 227, 230, 248, 254, 257; aes-
108; in Sevenchurch 77-78; in thetic character of 196-200;
Sloterdijk 168, 172, 174; and definition of 4-7; comparison
with Marion’s phenomenol- post-millennialism, xi, 162, 230,

ogy, 190-193 234, 249
outer frame, 3-5, 8, 9, 14, 36, postmodernism, vii, viii, 1, 13,
55, 56, 62, 81, 84,85, 86, 88, 39, 44, 46, 47, 50, 54, 57, 58,
222, 244; in architecture 121; 60, 65, 77, 79, 86, 97, 111,
in art 198, 200, 202, 203; in 113, 114, 161, 162, 229; in
Marion’s phenomenology 177, architecture viii, 21, 22, 119,
178, 184, 187; see also inner 120, 122, 128, 131, 148, 153,
frame, double framing 157; in art 195, 198, 199, 201,
206, 208, 212, 215, 216, 224;
Panic Room, xi, 15, 80, 82, 91, in Carver 58; in cinema 33,
92 34, 90, 97, 109; and deism 89;
performance art, xii, 195, 197, and discourse 30; and dual-
200, 201, 207, 254 ism ix; and gender 23, 24, 27,
performance, basic definition of 115, 255, 257; and Groys 167;
x, 36-37; aesthetic 46, 246; in and history 29, 30, 31, 32, 67,
anti-theory 163; in architec- 68, 217, 227; and the Holo-
ture 118, 120, 128, 155; in art caust 68, 69, 72, 73, 74; and
200, 201, 227, 261; in Butler intertextuality 58; and irony
229; in Groys 165; identifica- xii, 6, 14, 39, 197; in Hotel
tory 9; in Marion 178, 180- World 32; in The Man Who
182, 185, 187, 188; in the new Wasn’t There 99, 103; in Me-
monism 194; narrative 12, 15, mento 114; and narrative 53;
19, 25, 37, 66, 77, 80; and os- and Nietzsche 260; and per-
tensivity 36, 53, 82; and read- formance 229; and Pelevin
er response 36, 55; sexual 24; 18-19, 20; in photography
in Sloterdijk 170; successful 6, 206, 211; and Sloterdijk 174,
10, 12-13, 37, 75; tautological 175; and the sign ix; and sub-
character of 108 jectivity 8, 15, 21; and time
performatism, four basic features 100; transition to performa-
of 36-38; see also opaque sub- tism xii, 114, 116, 208, 226,
jectivity, originary scene, osten- 227; and victimization 16,
sivity, theist mode 17, 18, 69, 72, 240
Pfab, Rubert, 258 poststructuralism, viii, x, xii, 2,
Pfütze, Hermann, 255 6, 11, 13, 23, 31, 34, 44, 46,
Piano, Renzo, xi, 146 54, 80, 87, 94, 97, 104, 108,
Pollock, Jackson, 210 116, 120, 161, 162, 163, 164,
posthistory, ix, 29, 32, 30, 34, 67, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 193,
75, 76, 79, 103, 108, 109, 111, 195, 196, 204, 212, 229, 232,
117, 162, 165, 217 239, 250, 254, 255, 259
Index 269
presence, 9, 11, 34, 35, 36, 49, 55, Sherman, Cindy, 202
61, 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 95, 105, Simple Stories, xi, 16, 21, 33, 40,
108, 114, 124, 140, 162, 179, 58-62, 238
181, 194, 226, 257 Sloterdijk, Peter, xii, 12, 45, 47,
Princess and the Warrior, The, 87, 49, 76, 168-175, 176, 189,
88, 92, 93 193, 194, 235, 236, 244, 250,
251
Rapaport, Herman, 229 Smirnov, Igor, 229
Rauch, Neo, xii, 23, 195, 222- Smith, Ali, 40, 452
226, 261. Sokurov, Aleksandr, 34, 80, 94,
Rauterberg, Hanno, 249 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 118,
Reader, The, xi, 18, 21, 33, 40, 67- 246
76, 239, 241 Spieker, Sven, 245
Ross, Christine, 203-204, 255, Spivak, Gayatri, 64, 238
256 Stallabrass, Julian, 257-258
Rowe, Colin and Slutzky, Robert, Stanzel, Franz, 233
122, 247 Stegmann, Markus, 260
Roy, Arundhati, 32, 40, 63, 65, Stierstorfer, Klaus, 229
66, 239, 240 Struth, Thomas, 207, 211, 212,
Ruff, Thomas, 211, 212, 257, 258 257, 258
Run, Lola, Run, 79 sublimity, 59, 61, 66, 67 81, 82,
Russian Ark, xi, 15, 34-35, 80, 85, 88, 92, 103, 190, 219, 200,
104-112, 246 215, 220, 221, 239; in archi-
tecture 22, 121, 123, 125-126,
Sander, August, 143; in Kant 183, 185, 237,
saturation 22, 183, 185-188, 191, 258; in Marion 183-185; and
194, 226; in American Beauty terrorism 33, 40, 76-78; and
189-190 theism 200, 209-210
Sauerbruch, Matthias, 155 Syring, Marie Luise, 258
Schindler’s List, 70
Schlant, Ernestine, 241 Tarde, Gabriel de, 173
Schlink, Bernhard, 33, 72, 73, Tarkovsky, Andrei, 107
75, 241, 242 theist mode, x-xi, 38, 227; in
Schmitz, Helmut, 241, 242 architecture 21-23, 121-122,
Schultes, Axel xi, 148-150, 153, 129, 131-132, 136, 137, 138,
249 139, 140-141, 142, 148-151,
Schulze, Ingo, 61, 238 152, 154, 159; in art 200,
Schwenk, Bernhart, 225 204, 209, 210, 213, 215, 220,
Sevenchurch (Sedmikostelí), xi, 33, 221, 225, 226, 257; and Bud-
40, 77-78, 243 dhism 244; in film 89, 89-96,
98-99, 101-104; and God 247; Ungers, Oswald Matthias, 127,

and Groys 167; and Kant 256; 128, 156-158, 249
and Marion 186; in narration Urban, Miloš, 77, 243
19-21, 47, 51, 247, 257; in plot
13-19, 110; and Sloterdijk 171, Vinterberg, Thomas, 12, 17, 31,
173; and time 101, 110, 111 79, 86, 104, 105
Thurmann, Judith, 255 von Trier, Lars, vii, 14, 17, 79, 82,
Time’s Arrow, 70 85, 103, 105, 106
Tokarczuk, Olga, 28, 44, 236,
251, 255 Werner, Klaus, 261
transcendence, in architecture Wernik, Siegfried, 138
22, 37, 38, 77, 118-120, 121, Wilford, Michael, 137
122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, Wilkomirski, Bruno, 69, 70, 241,
140, 146, 148, 152, 157; and 242
the Beyond 85, 86; and cam- Witte, Georg, 243
era perspective 104, 106, 107; Wohlhage, Konrad, 154
and closure 15; and discourse Wolfe, Tom, 119
30; and dreaming 116; and Wölfflin, Heinrich, 212, 216,
framing 28, 81, 91, 112, 121, 227, 229
257; and God 56, 62, 190; Wooton, Anthony, 252
and homosexuality 245; and Wright, Frank Lloyd, 126
Marion 186-187, 188; and
narrative 15, 21, 26, 37, 66,
81, 91; objects embodying 35;
and originary scene 4-5, 46,
121, 196; and performance
194; in postmodernism 44;
and reader response 22, 36,
100, 102, 103, 188; and sci-
ence 170; and the sign 166;
and space 88, 91, 208, 211;
and the subject 12, 13, 14, 47,
80, 164, 167, 188, 211, 218;
and time 35, 36, 43, 108, 111
transcendent functionalism (resp.
ornamentalism), 22, 118-119,
131, 152
Tupitsyn, Vladimir, 223, 261
Tuymans, Luc, 260
Tykwer, Tom, 79, 87, 88, 93

Raoul Eshelman - Performatism or The End of Postmodernism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Raoul Eshelman - Performatism or The End of Postmodernism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism

Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism

The Davies Group Publishers

Library of Congress Cataloging–in-publication data

Cover photograph copyright © 2008, Raoul Eshelman.

Printed in the United States of America

Most of the material in Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism has

Chapter One is based very loosely on my original article on performa-

Chapter Two (Literature) combines two articles. The first originally

“Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003).” In: Anthropoetics 2

Chapter Four (Architecture) is a slightly shortened version of an ar-

Chapter Five (Theory) will appear with small changes in a Sonder-

Chapter Six (Art) is forthcoming in the 2007/8 edition of Anthropoetics.

Some twenty years ago, Andreas Huyssen published an article

by Charles Jencks in his classic work on postmodern architecture.

practical terms. No one wants to get caught practicing “metaphysics”

never made much headway against the prevailing dualist mindset. As

temporal and spatial relations. These concepts will be developed

section on the “new monism” treats theoreticians such as Walter

in the following pages anyone with an open mind should be able to

Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism

Performatism may be defined most simply as an epoch in which a

makeup and impossible to determine in advance. Any claim that a

Given this basic – and epistemologically well-founded – suspi-

between the positive aesthetic identification and the dogmatic, coer-

ironic regress. Obviously, this opposition between the locked frame

The inner frame,

The outer frame, consisting of the newly

It is revealing to compare the originary monist sign with the no-

It’s also important to remember that Ricky shares Lester’s com-

Because of its focus on unity, performatism also allows for a new,

It is also worth noting that the notion of constructed subjectivity

Because of its emphasis on transcending coercive frames rather

it into the outer frame of a particular work. Although the irony of

transgressing against basic social decorum – a plot device that is still

may be27). As a rule, in performatism we find highly constructed fa-

peripheralized other of a hegemonial, oppressive center; the victim

the identificatory value of sacrificial centering that is completely alien

irony. However, it would seem that he is entirely serious in his desire

Because of their dogmatic posture performatist narratives create

viewing or reading process into an involuntary act of belief stands

his focus remains consistently on the Buddhist goal of self-annihila-

Theist Creation in Architecture and the Visual Arts

performatist narrative, the basic aim of this new kind of architecture

In the visual arts, performatism has developed in reaction to con-

In performatism there is a markedly different approach to sex

postfeminism. The second is to stipulate exactly what the natural,

This centering of otherness in performatism applies not only to

strategies ranging everywhere from chastity to genetic engineering

Performatist Time and History

Of the varied postmodern concepts of time and history that

incorporated into the sign instead of being excluded from it is a re-

onto the Unterbau of what he called late capitalism. Unfortunately

an accommodationist one that seeks to create warmed air pockets of

In aesthetic terms we experience time most intensely in the cin-

of cinematic innovation, would also seem to leave us in a typical post-

filmic present corresponding exactly to the real time of the filming

Since my introductory discussion of performatism has covered a

4. The spatial and temporal coordinates of performatism are cast

The performatist turn in literature has been gradual and unmarked

exactly the same gimmick – a fancy international hotel as a allegory of

On the surface, Ali Smith’s Hotel World1 is concerned with the

five striking individuals dominate each section – they are, in order